works and days…

View 718 Tuesday, March 27, 2012

My love affair with the Thermaltake Case continues, but alas the new system isn’t finished: there appear to be problems with the motherboard. Not with the case and not caused by the case. Our difficulties have to do with installation, but things worked well enough that I found that this massive elegant case is very quiet as well as easy to service.

But we didn’t get the system going yet. I’m shooting for Windows 8, and if that is too much trouble we’ll drop back to Windows 7; and meanwhile we’ll keep all the older machines until the new one is trustworthy. I always keep several machines in operation and my backup system besides home server is mostly to be sure everything important is copied all over the place. There are better ways, but this is an old habit.

Much of the day was devoured by locusts again, and more work piles up. And I have to make ready for the big conference in Colorado Springs next Monday and Tuesday; Space Command is having a conference/symposium. I also have contest finals to judge, housekeeping stuff, errands, and I have been trying to throw out junk as we do excavation down to the layers that accumulated when I was getting my hard x-ray treatment. And they have scheduled another MRI which ought to be routine.

And we found just enough errors in the eBook publication of The Secret of Black Ship Island, and I went through it all today to find them. Most are trivial – Forward instead of Foreword, some stray and/or missing carriage returns, a couple of run-on words, and an actual scene inconsistency which I won’t call attention to but Dave Kenny did. My thanks! Anyway that had to be fixed and I found a bunch of minor errors when I went through the published edition – all fairly trivial, one run-on word (andall) and as I said, some small formatting errors. I should have them all noted and off to our agent, and Kristine will be able to fix them in one pass. Anyone who bought the novella from Amazon will be able to trade it in on a free upgraded copy when we’re done.

From reader comments including Mr. Kenny’s the minor errors aren’t enough to spoil the reading experience, but it’s still our job to produce the best copy we can. Mr. Heinlein drilled that into my head from earliest days in the racket. We owe the reader our best effort – and now that we are both authors and publishers we have a bit more to do. I have always appreciated the copy editors who have worked with our books all these years, (even though copy editors are popularly referred to as the class enemy by most authors): Now I appreciate them even more. It’s tough work.

I’ll also get up a mail bag tonight. There’s more information on the Zimmerman/Martin case. Some is shocking.