Writing News
My Galleys arrived this week!!!
What? You are not leaping with joy at this fabulous announcement? You don’t even know what Galleys are? You sound an awful lot like the Hunky Hubby and all those other normal, non-writer folks who put up with me.
Let me explain my excitement.
Once my editor and I were done with the back and forth of editing the Pelican team put Copenhagen Cozenage into e-book form. They picked a font for the text and the chapter titles, made the copyright page and those pages in the back with links to the publisher and formatted everything exactly how they wanted it. The final step is where they send the author (oh my goodness, I’m the author!!!) the Galleys. The Galleys are nothing more than the finished book but with all of the lines of text numbered at the side. The author (that’s me again…hee hee) then has 10 days to look over the book to determine if anything has been missed. Did the hero’s eye color change on page 43? Was a quote missed in a line of dialogue? Did I say “dust moat” instead of “dust mote” or call an elk’s antlers “horns” instead? If I encounter a mistake I wrote down the page# and the line# and what the mistake was and what the line should say on a form on the Pelican Book Group website. After 10 days, I will send the form in to my editor. This is the final polish to make sure that everything is just right.
I have been reading about Galleys for years on writer’s and agent’s websites, but never had any of my own. Now I, Kristen Joy Wilks, have read through my own Galleys (I don’t think you have to capitalize this…but I want to, so I will!) and am that much closer to having a book that I wrote in print. It almost doesn’t seem real.
So that was what I was doing this week, along with printing up my Writer’s Time Chart for the year (wherein I keep track of all the time I spend writing) and I also looked through my NaNoWriMo project from Adrian’s perspective. I didn’t quite finish, but I hope to finish both Adrian and Kaden’s perspective next week.
I also entered a pitch contest.
I was reading an agent’s blog and on a whim submitted my pitch for the NaNoWriMo manuscript for a contest. Over thirty writers posted their pitch paragraphs in the comments. She picked her favorite the next week. Look who she picked… LOOK HERE
So cool! Congrats on the pitch and the galleys!!! Now, is that your next writing project? (sorry, I haven’t been following along very well)
Thanks so much Krista-Lynn. That is kind of my next writing project, sort of. I’ve already written the rough draft and revised it three times. But I also have another novella that I wrote the rough draft for and have revised several times. I want to get the novella polished and submitted to my editor in the hopes that she likes it by April 1st. I want to get the manuscript that won the pitch contest revised and polished and ready by mid May so that if there are any agents who represent middle grade at the writer’s conference Rolana and I go to, I can pitch it to them. But I also had an idea for a Christmas novella. I’m going to spend February (Lord willing) going super fast and writing the rough draft of the Christmas novella and then it needs to be polished so that I can submit it by May 1st. All Christmas stories have to be submitted by then. So the answer…kind of. Hmmm…my goals seem pretty ambitious. Here’s to hoping I can get all this done.