Glitches and Smooshing Words

So with mere months to go to the birth of my book baby, what's happening in my world? Well, the book cover is about to be finalised after some tweaking, and the actual manuscript is on the final back and forth copyedit before it goes to the typesetters. But how this final stage has made me laugh and laugh. I can't tell you how many times we've discussed and changed the position of the characters as they sit on a branch up a tree.

Yep - you heard me right. Should they sit opposite each other or on adjacent branches? Are they facing each other or just looking over at each other. Should they be on the same branch rather than two separate branches? Then they can face each other more directly. That's page 7 folks. In a few months you can see what we decided on. Thank heavens I have an amazingly patient and thorough editor!

Other than the mystery of the branch, we had some technical hitches when I upgraded my Office package. First, the email with my final copy edit went astray and a week later my poor editor sent a slightly worried - Did you get my email? message. This has never happened to me before, but of course, it had to happen now. I explained about my new system, feeling like I was telling my editor that my dog had eaten my homework. Yup, thanks a bunch tech fairies. To add insult to injury, my system then decided it didn't want to marry with my publisher's WORD document anymore without smooshing together certain words - that's the technical term my editor came up with and it just shows how on the same page we are because it's the word I'd have used too :)

That issue resolved, my computer lives another day, and we are now ready for the typesetters. Can't wait to see what the text and pages look like when they're turned into a book format.

Other than that the only thing I'd add at this stage is that you need to be okay with juggling between writing that next book and working on the edits and book covers and marketing for the current book...I find it hard to pull myself out of the book I'm currently writing, but I'm getting better at it. It comes down to actually missing the characters...it's the author version of FOMO !!