I've completed two rounds of proofreading through my manuscript for The Kraken's War, and I've commissioned a full wrap-around cover from Fabled Beast Design, who I found through Bluesky. I am really excited about the cover. I haven't even seen the mockup yet, but I am super confident it's going to look outstanding. My sister is working on editing the manuscript, and she has experience with that sort of thing, so I have complete faith in her ability to do an amazing job.
Once the cover art and editing are complete, there's just the matter of shelling out for the Vellum license to be able to create and submit really prettily formatted files to KDP for both Kindle and print versions of the book. While I don't actually expect to sell many copies of either version of the book, there's just something about a printed copy of a book I've written, which I can't help but think will make me feel like a real writer once I've got it in my hands.
While progress on The Kraken's War is a out of my hands for the moment, I thought I'd work on another horror short story, which I've already started on. I mean, I've literally only just started on it. It's only got 243 words written, so far. I got distracted by Bluesky and, while there, became inspired to write a new blog post. Speaking of short stories, I submitted one called Motion Detected to Fraidy Cat Press for their Fraidy Cat Quarterly publication. I actually tried to find beta readers for that story on Bluesky. I made a Google Form and everything, but I got zero responses, so the only people who have actually read it are family and friends. My sister gave me good feedback, so at least there's that.
So, I've been using Ulysses on my MacBook Air to do all of my writing, but after I exported my novel's manuscript to .DOCX format and uploaded it to Google Docs for my sister to edit, I discovered Ulysses is not very good at catching certain types of errors. Specifically grammatical errors wherein the wrong word was typed. For example, the word "waisted" instead of "wasted" or the word "is" instead of "his". They don't get caught because Ulysses isn't looking that deeply at the grammar of what you're typing, but Google Docs sure as hell does. I found so many blue squiggles for things like that, even after one round of proofreading, it was embarrassing. So, I'm writing the short story I'm currently working on in Google Docs. It makes me sad, because I really like Ulysses, but needing to go back and make corrections in two places is a bit much.
Now for a short checklist of things to do in the near future:
- Finish the short story I just started
- Write summary blurb for The Kraken's War
- Do some KDP research