Hello there, friends! I know it’s been awhile and I apologize for being incommunicado for over a month. You know how it is… having nothing to report really isn’t very exciting. But now, behold: I post an update on my progress. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. We’re rolling forward. Slowly, but surely, Wyldling Snare is creeping toward its release date. Hey… did I just make a play on words?

Can you believe it? Wyldling Snare will be published in ONE MONTH. Insert excited squeal here. Want to order a copy before Sept. 10th? Check it out: https://mybook.to/wyldlingsnare

I completed the editing phase last week. It’s a funny story. One of my dear writer friends gave it a once-over (totally gratis and out of the goodness of their heart). Then another friend suggested I ask for beta readers. Snort. Yeah, right; I did not see that panning out at all. I tried, but… As it transpires, life happens, and my deadline is a little too tight. No worries and no hard feelings. I’m confident my critique buddies caught the most egregious errors. Wyldling Snare has been through the wringer multiple times. It is what it is at this point.

Back to the editing…

I took part in Camp NaNoWriMo last month to flesh out book 2, Wyldling Trials—but that’s another story. ProWritingAid offered participants a discount code for a lifetime premium license. Guess who now has a lifetime premium license for ProWritingAid?

I had fun analyzing the heck out of Wyldling Snare. As you might imagine, the manuscript could always use improvement. Not every suggestion was salient—or even correct—but the program found many things I decided were important enough to fix. I even reduced the word count from 94.5K to 90.3K.

Here’s some free advice: use adverbs sparingly. They are tricky beasties. Sometimes they’re useful and other times they clutter up the page and add fluff the story doesn’t need. Instead, use a strong verb, if one exists for the described action. I know this disappoints and saddens you—but don’t fret. An adverb is occasionally okay.

With the final edits completed, I submitted the manuscript to a formatter with a deadline of August 21st. What does a formatter do? The formatter designs the internal layout of your book—the actual text of your story—and assures it looks appealing to your target audience, conveys your chosen theme or message, and is easy to read. This considers the book size, the type and size of fonts used in the text, as well as any graphics at the beginning of chapters or section breaks. This service is strictly design-based and does not include any kind of editing, so any errors in the text will carry through to the resulting format.

For initial release, Wyldling Snare will be available in both ebook and paperback, so my formatter will create a digital version and paperback version. A hardcover edition could be in the future… if the series proves popular enough. I really don’t know how the logistics of that work. More research is required on the subject. Maybe, someday, there will be in an audiobook format. But that’s a whole other cavern of dragons.

I’m eager to see what my formatter delivers! Counting down the days… Well, I was already counting down the days. Only one month to go!

As a reward for reading my entire article, here is a map I created using Inkarnate: