I've just finished rereading The Lost Star's Sea in print and have uploaded the improved ebook version to all my distributers. I made many minor corrections in the text -- things like missing commas, and words. I also made sure that a character's name was spelled the same way page to page, and that the islands don't change names...
I fear that I'm not the most detail orientated of persons, and that occasionally comes back to bite me on the ass, as some readers have pointed out. Hopefully I'm getting better at seeing what is actually on the page. Most of these corrections are minor. For example, I decided only after finishing The Castaways of the Lost Sea, that all my Pela Characters would only have a single compound name in the XxxXxxx format. However in the Castaways story, some also had "first names" as well, and I missed a few of them when I went back to eliminate them. Another example of being blind to minor details in words is that DeArjen's Island became DeAnjen's island by the end of the book. Hopefully I've caught all those errors.
I also eliminated some repetitive passages and I streamlined some of the explanations at the end of the story, making them clearer and a lot shorter. All, in all, I think the book is 4 or 5 pages shorter -- out of the original 728. Oh, well, I tried. I guess I write my stories at a rather leisurely pace.
The thing is, I write my books for an audience of one -- me. And I happen to like to spending as much time in a book that I enjoy as I can, so I'm never in a hurry to leave it. Since I write the books I want to read, they tend to be rather long. I also write my books as the memoirs of the narrator, so that I use what he chooses to include in his telling of the story to define his character. I also try to make sure that my characters are grounded in the everyday details of life of the worlds I have imagined to make the worlds more real as well. So, all in all, my stories are leisurely affairs. However, I am happy to report that I seem to have found a kindred spirit -- in Chinese TV.
For the last several months I've been greatly enjoying watching Chinese spy and police TV shows on Netflix -- Rookie Agent Rogue, When a Snail Falls in Love, and now, The Disguiser. The last two are based on Chinese novels -- and they run around 40 episodes of 40 minutes each -- taking more than 26 hours to bring a novel to life on the screen. And these are espionage and police dramas with plenty of bullets flying, not soap operas. Of course, I don't know how long these novels are to begin with, but it is clear that they take their time when bringing these novels richly to life on a screen. I should also mention that part of the fun in watching these shows is that they are in Mandarin , with subtitles. Now, 40 some years ago, I took several years of Chinese language in college, and though I was terrible at it, I'm enjoying rediscovering the simple words, phrases, and following the speech patterns of the Chinese language. All in all, something to look forward to each day.
As always, if you haven't gotten to The Lost Star's Sea yet, be sure and download the version 2 (November 2017), the best version ever!
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