Hired Oscar Wilde

I got The Early Fox back from the proofreader. The main thing he did was change " -- " to "--" and add a trailing space to ellipses when they occurred in the middle of a sentence.

All of my style guides say that the em dash can be used with or without spaces; AP style likes the space, Chicago no space. But the trend is also spaces for journalism, no spaces for books. So I'll go for that. I had already switched to no spaces when used at the end of a line. Which, oddly, my proofreader missed in the one or two spots I hadn't it right myself.

He gave me about a dozen line notes. Of which half changed the meaning of the sentence on the way to making them more grammatical.

So did I get value out of the service? Well, the nature of the changes is a sign this was a human working, not a robot. (He caught the one place Penny returned to her hotel, after she'd kicked up a fuss all the way back in Chapter 3 that she was choosing to call it a motel.)

And he did pick up several annoying omitted words or extra/missing spaces.

But the thing I really gained is assurance. Most of the mistakes he caught were things I needed to learn, and now that I have, I don't need him. The even better thing is what he didn't find; the many pages that didn't have a single note on them.

I am dumping money down this drain, and I haven't even hired a cover artist yet.

The SEO person (that is, Kindle marketing person) has sent me an offer but I haven't signed it yet. She's the one who zeroed in on thriller over adventure, and mystery over archaeology.

Which brings me to the next book.

I'd really love trying to write on deadline. With five (six) books down now, I have a pretty good idea of the tasks and labor and I could break it down to milestones.

Had a bunch of ideas floating around for Penny. Today over brunch a bunch of them fell together -- but not in quite the forms I was expecting or hoping.

The stuff I wanted to do with a EPCOT-like planned community, and my Elon Musk stand-in, and a tech center somewhere in West Virginia or something, packed up, grabbed the science museum I had lying around along with an ex NASA engineer, and went to Greenland.

So now that's the over-the-top one -- but it isn't in conus anymore so wrong for the Bill Bixby arc.

What was left took the coal miners strike, went looking for a crime, and after a weird detour through urban fantasy heroine archetypes, leather coats, and vampires found itself a for-profit juvie center Penny can stage an intervention at -- after a contested election goes through the the help (and hindrance) of a modern-day Mother Jones.

And the only reason to put up with Penny going underground again is that I get to call one of the parts "Enemy Mine."

Anyhow, lots of fun, but not exactly what I was wanting for the next episode. Maybe I should just get that tagelharpa for her and do the viking story next...

If I only I was closer on Blue. I have the basic layout of the place. I have lots of tasty bits with my tech and aliens.

I lack a sensawunda. There's nothing about the place you could put on a cover or in the elevator pitch. They aren't on the back of a giant turtle or doing magic with hair plaiting or have laser shurikans.

I think the problem was going in the Honor Harrington direction. That is, Mil-SF with the focus being on one person's career progression. Because those things do love them politics and engineering but only from the numbers side. Which gets as excessive as their counts of missiles.

(I just read the first book of the Lost Fleet series. Space battles galore. The protagonist is the admiral of a fleet and the POV character. Through the length of the series, we get like five settings, tops. And two of them are his cabin and the galley.)

So I also have a plot currently that goes after one group of aliens and beats them up. I can't make it really go deeper into the politics or philosophy or theme of the place, much less the physics or whatever. It is just "oh, and we have to shoot at some bad guys."

The main reason I'm not quickly switching gears and cranking out the Tiki book instead, is I want to decorate my space to put myself in the right mood first. And despite retiring, I have yet to clean up my place properly.

Well, that and I actually cranked out 7,000 words already -- in one day! -- on a new, nonfiction book.