Shadows of an Iron Kingdom - Done

 

Just a quick update this week. I finished writing the third Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure -- Shadows of an Iron Kingdom -- this week and have turned it over to my first proofreader, my wife. After she goes through it, I will send it along to my volunteer beta readers for their input and corrections. I anticipate its release in the first half of July 2021.

I finished the first draft on 2 May 2021, took a couple of weeks off to work on another project, and returned to do the second and third draft, finishing the third on 2 June. I wrote the first two drafts in LibreOffice. This time, I uploaded the second draft to Google Drive, and did the third draft in Google Doc. Google Docs has a more robust grammar checking feature than LibreOffice, highlighting correctly spelled, but wrong words which LibreOffice doesn't do. 

I am nearly completely blind to typos -- I "read" what I expect to read, regardless of what is actually written, and so, despite my best efforts, my manuscripts are riddled with typos. I'm always looking for ways to lesson the burden on my proofreaders.

For the last book I uploaded the manuscript to Google Doc after the final draft, but this time I decided to combine making the corrections it found with my third draft. After going through it once, I downloaded back to a LibreOffice format, and then uploaded and converted it back to a Google Doc just to see if it would find more errors, as it doesn't always find all of them, for some reason, things like the most obvious ones -- double words. It highlights some, while overlooking others. Anyway, the second run though did find more mistakes -- some of which I may have made in my corrections. Which would seem unlikely -- but then, well, I'm good at making mistakes. But to be fair, LibreOffice does not underline typos until after you enter the next character, which, when going through the manuscript making corrections, the previous correction may well be off screen by the time you type in the next character, thus, you never see your new typo... That anyway, is my story, and I'm sticking with it. In any event, running it through Google Doc the last time significantly cut typos -- but did not eliminate them, as I had hoped. We'll see if this method of double checking yields a better result.

I haven't written the blurb  yet, nor painted an acceptable cover, so those will have to wait until next week.