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Progress report January 2019

Book news.  We have a new publication date for Stars Beyond. It’s 22 October 2019* 20 January 2020. We’re looking forward to it.

We have also seen the cover, which we can’t show you yet. Love it.

The completed rewrite of Stars Beyond is due at the end of January.  Sherylyn has her headphones on, listening to the Microsoft Read-Aloud function.

I’m following her edits, accepting or rejecting changes.

We try to read all our books aloud. Reading aloud to each other is good, when you have the time, because you smooth the writing together.  However, even when you do this, you miss some basic issues because you read the words you expect to see, so you don’t always pick up things like missing words.

A total stranger reading aloud will read the words, but we read what we expect to see. That’s why it was so great when Mum was with us. She read each word.

The read-aloud function in Word reads each word, and it reads it in a monotone. It picks up things we don’t see.

Sherylyn’s been listening for three full days now. It’s a big job, but important. She’s found a lot of missing commas, commas that should have been full stops, typos (if the reader can’t understand the name, it spells it out, which is a definite indicator there’s a typo) and just jerky words in general.

She’s also picking up lots of missing words, repeated words and awkward paragraphs.

We’re starting to think about the story we want to work on next.

* Date has been changed since we originally wrote this.

6 replies on “Progress report January 2019”

We don’t know yet. We have ideas (two main ones) but it depends totally on discussions with our agent. It’s more what she can sell.

One idea is in the Linesman universe, but it’s not Ean’s story. The other is something new.

Great news! Due two days after my birthday so will take that as a good omen. Please warn via twitter closer to the date so I remember to buy it.

Thanks for the lovely books and hope sales go well.

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