A while back now, I started writing a new novel.

I was having a blast … as usual … creating the characters, backstories and moving the action along. And then I hit a roadblock.

The main character is a young man named Orwell Gasteyer. He is a fine upstanding citizen of a very small city in the northern part of Wyoming.  The story is about changes in his life and how he is working to come to terms with them.

It is also a “whodunit.” I have never written a whodunit before, and while I have quite a few chapters (and words, about 32,000) in the manuscript already, I’m at a loss right now for how to continue. I’ve watched plenty of crime dramas on television. But how you write for visual entertainment is very different from written entertainment. And I must confess, I have not read a lot of murder mysteries. And basically, this story boils down to a murder mystery/kidnapping.

There is a twist to this mystery. These days, that does seem to be the case. All sorts of writers are combing genres in interesting ways. So there is a bit of the supernatural in this one.

I’d really like to say that I am confident that I will complete the novel sometime soon. But because I began the writing somewhere around May of 2022 and it is still not finished, I can’t really say that.

Even so, I thought I’d put this notice on my blog. Maybe it will help me to get on with it.

September 14, 2024

The novel is live and available on Amazon. It took a long time to get this one published. Hopefully, the next Orwell Gasteyer novel will not take as long. But you can never know what life is going to throw at you. Oh, I’ve changed the working title of the next novel to “With a Little Luck.” I’ll be making a page for that soon where you can find news about it’s progress.

September 12, 2024

Proof reading is a pain in the back side. I can understand why authors pay proof readers to do the work for them. Not only is it tedious, but having written and re-written the novel, I’ve become so familiar with it that I can no longer actually see the typos and mis-spellings.

My husband helped with the proof reading (I always order two proof copies), but he can’t help me when, in the process of editing and correcting, I make new mistakes.

Kindle Direct Publishing does a really great job of making self-publishing easy. But … they don’t have spell check for the hard copy editions. They do offer spell-checking for the eBook version.

I wish that I would remember that and upload and ready for publishing on the eBook first. But alas, I hit the publishing button on the paperback and then went on to do the eBook and it found two spelling mistakes. Both were made during the editing process when I was supposed to be fixing mistakes and not making new ones.

So now I have to wait until it is available … it’s processing now … before I can make any changes to the content of the paperback. Dang!

On the other hand, I did it. It’s done … mostly. Now I can get back to work on the next Orwell Gasteyer novel, “Out of a Clear Blue Sky.”

August 7, 2024

I actually finished writing the novel a little over a week ago. I proofed the digital manuscript as best I could and downloaded it to KDP. I looked over the whole thing and decided it was good enough to order proof copies.

In some ways, the hardest part of putting a book together is getting the cover set up. KDP makes it fairly easy with their templates and stock photos, but it’s still time consuming and occasionally frustrating.

My other wish is that KDP had a bigger selection of photos for covers. Don’t get me wrong, they do actually have a lot. But they don’t always have what I want. That’s why the covers on my first two Millie novels are so plain.

If I were more tech savvy, I could make my own cover photo and upload. I’ve tried with the limited tools I have and failed miserably. Oh well.

While I was proofreading the digital manuscript of “As Luck Might have It,” I began writing a second Orwell Gasteyer novel with a working title of, “Out of a Clear Blue Sky.” I’m already 47,000 words into it. It has been moving along better than the first one, but I still have trouble with the “procedural” part of it

So I’m putting the new novel on hold for a while as I proof read the hard copy. I also ordered a proof copy for my husband. Eventually, he’ll read it and hopefully spot the goofs I miss.