Holidays and all...

So, the holidays put a bit of a quash on blogging so I'll get back into more of how I went about creating the book tomorrow. However, last week I came back from a trip to Kentucky to find that my proof of The Solstice Treaty was here! I used Lightning Source to print it and while the experience of laying out the book and the cover was not nearly as fun as I had hoped, the final product was pretty exciting to see. I did spend time finding some typos and a few friends gave me some comments on a few plot points but other than that it looked fine (except the cover which is too dark. Sometimes going from RGB colors to CMYK colors can make the art look dark.)

So, I've lightened it up, made my edits and submitted the changes to the printer. Why do I need physical books you ask? Good question. It's because I plan on sending them to reviewers who only accept hardcopies. I also am planning on attending and selling the novel at the VA festival of the book which happens here every year.

Anyway, here's a pic and I'll do some more posting this weekend.

"Book 1"

Well, now that I had secured my editor, I took to the serious task for writing the book. I had already completed the rough draft for "book 1" which contained the first 5 chapters. In these chapters I really wanted to show that five events took place that were all somehow intertwined. I knew that jumping back and forth between 1940's Europe and modern day might be a little jarring but I wanted to introduce them as quickly as possible so I could get into the backstory of Mark and Tess and then spend most of "book 2" building them up. It's funny. I thought that I would never have to go back and touch these chapters. I thought they were perfect. Hahaha. I ended up later pulling a lot of bits out of Chapter 2 simply because it became unwieldy. Anyway, I made book 1 (which is really just part 1) shorter because I loved how it ended with the phone call from Tess. It seemed like a great stopping point.