Friday, February 4, 2011

Ideas flowing, kindle readthru

Today was a good day for story ideas for the next Hemlock book. I always feel happy when the ideas are flowing.
It will be interesting to see how the writing phase of this book goes versus the first one. I had a much, much rougher idea of where I was going with the story as I wrote the first book. So it was much more organically grown (vs. planned).
With a sequel, you can't be as free with ideas since you are constrained by what has gone before in terms of plot and characters. Also, you are somewhat constrained by the tone of the former book. I keep thinking to myself to make sure this next story is a "Hemlock story". This means swords and sorcery combat, etc, etc.
A lot of the first book was written to a soundtrack of hard rock and heavy metal. I'm currently listening to more New Age and 60's rock. I'm not sure how this will impact the new story, but this is where the "Hemlock-ization" may come in. I have to make sure it's still a Hemlock story...

On a less happy note, I impulsively decided to read through the first book on my Kindle tonight--and I spotted a number of errors. I didn't get my kindle until after the book was published. I later read that you can spot errors more easily on the Kindle. I'm a believer now. What is nice is that you can annotate the errors as you go and then refer to them easily under "My Clippings". That's a really nice feature for editing.
I am very bummed out about these errors though. How many people have read my sample and stopped due to these errors? Frustrating. I will continue to read and will probably publish an updated version asap to at least address errors at the very start of the book. Many of these errors are a direct result of an edit I did for the last revision to make some tense changes in the flashbacks. I guess I did a poor job of editing my edits. Sigh.

1 comment:

  1. Update on the errors spotted last night. It was all a mirage. Amazon has a policy that makes little sense to me. You can't download a new version of a book that you purchase. You can only download the exact version that you purchased. So the errors I was seeing have already been corrected. Argh! This confusion caused me a lot of unnecessary anxiety last night!

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