I have been super-busy today, hence the lateness of this post.
I spent most of the day doing some final tweaks to I Hunt Killers before sending it off to my second round of betas. Now, usually I send a manuscript to all of my betas at once, but the way schedules worked out this time, I ended up doing two rounds. Which is actually good for me right now because it means that I got to implement some changes to fix that problem I mentioned before these new people could see it. Now I can get their reactions to the fix without them having been biased the earlier version. Score!
The fix for that problem, by the way, necessitated adding a few thousand words to the book. Can I just say that I hate adding text to a book? It feels somehow artificial to me. But I know that readers won’t be able to tell: “Hey, this part was missing originally! He added it in later!” If I do my job right, it will be seamless.
And I guess that’s the problem: It’ll be seamless to the reader, but it’ll never be seamless to me. Every time I look at a book I wrote, I can always tell what got added in, and it bugs me. I feel like everyone can tell.
Some good news to report: I’ve received my very first finished copy of Archvillain! This means that I finally got to see the cover treatment my editor has been trying to describe to me for months now. It’s really cool! He rattled off a list of processes that were involved, but I don’t remember any of them because I was distracted by shinypretty.
I took a picture:
And I shot some video, just to see the effects “in action.” Unfortunately, the picture and the video still don’t really do the cover justice. I think this is one of those things you just have to see in person. So, come October, everyone head to your local bookstore and check out the cover!
Should you feel compelled to buy the book, too, well, that’s OK. 🙂
See you next week!