Getting caught up...

I have been a little neglectful here lately. I have finished writing and editing book 2 of The Juno Letters series, Cross of Fire. It is the story of Gela Pientka who appears as a minor character but a major turning point in The Juno Letters, Book 1.

We also finished the first book in audio format - we, because it was Gary Regal, my narrator, who did all the work. What it did point out to me was there were some errors in NOCK on Wood, the first book in The Viper Chronicles, that had to be fixed. I took the opportunity to rework all three novels in a slightly different but standardized format. I also made some adjustments to Juno book 1 to make it match with the story as it emerged in book 2.

That meant reediting and reformatting for all of my media, including print-on-demand. It has been a huge task, but I just posted the revised editions online today. I'll put the POD versions up later in the week - don't want to miss Cyber Monday.

We are going to start the audio version of Juno after the first, and plan to have all three of The Juno Letters books done by June. That said, I have also started on book 3 - The Story of Ariele. I am toying with the story line and right now I think a great title will be The Black Sun, based on the story as I see it. That may change, however, so don't hold me to it.

That said, as I went to print on Cross, Apple pulled a fast one and gutted my favorite word processor PAGES, and took out the ability to do facing pages - critical for print-on-demand. I tried to do it in Word - big mistake. There were so many times that changes I made were not reflected in the saved version (I actually did a SAVE AS in three different file names and had 3 different sets of errors in the final product .. go figure) that I wasted almost 8 hours trying to format for POD. 8 hours is a lot, and at my billing rate ... well, that was the last time.

I switched to Mellel for my final product, a powerful word processor I had looked at once before. It is from a small software company in Israel, and the product is optimized for large manuscripts. It is NOT for the weak kneed, but once I got the rhythm of the interface, I fell in love. It is fast, powerful, and stable. I was able to reformat all 3 documents for print in 4 hours (as opposed to 8 hours for 1 in Word).

I still write in Pages - Cloud synced with my iPad, which is important to my work flow. I transfer to Mellel for the final document.

Google 'Mellel' if you want to see what a REAL word processor is like. They will give you a 30-day trial.