Half-Title

 Prints arrived. Gave one out, will be giving two more this weekend. Spotted several things that I want to adjust before the release.

Among them being re-arranging the Front Matter. And...humph. I looked at the information page at KDP. I looked at Wikipedia. Those more-or-less agree, but only more-or-less. Then I pulled a dozen paperbacks from my own bookshelf and not a single one agreed with the KDP/Wikipedia style.

So I'm going to go title page with copyright on the verso side. TOC, epigram on the next recto after that, and half-title on a third recto just before the prologue starts (also on recto, like all of the parts and chapters).

The ebook will be almost identical, except that the TOC is actual links (I discovered how to do that).

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Then there's some graphics clean-up. KDP was barfing at the full cover for Hounds for some reason so I stuck the front side image into their Cover Creator. Which is okay, but I like the control I get over doing the full cover myself and by the time I had Knows ready it was taking full covers again.

There's a nice bare spot on the back cover of Hounds. I am so tempted to put up a request for a pulp magazine cover or a playbill on Fiver and see what happens.

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And editing. I am afraid I may get structural edits from my beta readers, and it is too late to apply those. Once again, I'll learn from them and move forward. I have a dozen edits of my own already (read most of the print version myself). Half of them are places where italics got left off or I want to check if it is Defoe or Dafoe (It's Defoe). But the others are slightly more work.

Re-doing the sword fight and the Geordie Final Exam to bring out the drama and the various threads. Actually, I think that's it. Although there's a self-locking door that bugs me but I haven't come up with an idea for it.

Oh, the italics? Turns out that the method I was using to highlight text for work notes carries through in formatting even with "ignore formatting" checked in the compiler. So I had to hard-format the entire text, then go back and put the italics back in. And I missed a few.

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Didn't identify any specific ways to improve my method. Did get some metrics out of it. Hounds was done in eight months, and only about four of those months were actually hammering out text. Planning took a full two months and formatting and re-writes another month or two. Somewhere in there was a month of re-writes on Knows, so I'm not counting that.

It was still long enough so I'd lost some of the specific notes I wanted when I got to the scene they were for. But at the same time, I really need a certain amount of simmer time to get the ideas together. I am quite convinced the reason I've re-done the sword fight twice already is because I pushed to write it before it was quite ready.

So I'm not sure how to tighten down to six months. At least the other issue; the lack of focus in the plot, is something I should be getting steadily better at.