Tuesday, April 8, 2008

It's REAL!!!

So far, so good, as they say. The Proof Copy of my first "baby" arrived the other day. It badly needs cover art and a quick flip through reveals that it definitely needs another line-by-line edit. How could I have missed so many close-quotation marks and periods? What's my reader supposed to make of unattributed quotations when I can no longer keep track of the speaker? Where did I pick up the annoying habit of almost always using an interesting adjective a second time within a paragraph or two of it's first appearance? And why didn't I notice THAT rather glaring editorial gaffe on the second draft?

In spite of its warts, though, it's an actual, 379 page paperback novel. It says so, right there on the cover!

Mai Shangri-La
A Novel
Robert J. Rubis

So far, CreateSpace has definitely lived up to their end of our "agreement". They've taken my uploaded file, laid it out in a 6X9 format, added a cover, and bound it in a finished product. The rest is just tweaking. I'll hope to complete the next round of editing within the month, and hopefully by the end of April, I'll have my first book available (Print-on-Demand) for sale. Exciting stuff!

Watch for "Mai Shangri-La" on your CreateSpace homepage (and hopefully on Amazon, too) sometime soon.