So very much editing

Welcome to my nascent blog! As I sometimes go away for very long periods of time to write, I wanted to create a place to post some updates on progress.

I am presently in that dull point of writing -- editing and publishing. I have my outline all ready to go for the third story in the "Constant Love" series, and really want to start writing, but am being responsible and working on my editing projects to stay on track.

Those are: editing and publishing the second story in the series, "A Change of Legacies," and... working on a Kindle and paperback edition of "A Constant Love"! I am both excited and terribly nervous about the latter, but so many people have encouraged me to publish it, and have said they've reread it, that I thought it a worthwhile endeavour to make it available in these more convenient formats.

But there's a lot of work to do. I made a number of errors in title and address that needed to be corrected, there were a few adjustments that I wanted to make to better foreshadow the later stories, and, sadly, I decided to remove Boccherini references from the story. Character copyright is a muddy area, and I did not want anything in the story to overlap too much with the character of Jack Aubrey, from Patrick O'Brian's novels and the movie (although anyone who has read the novels will know that the idea of Jack Aubrey serving as one of the romantic leads in a story called "A Constant Love" is completely laughable -- he and Captain Stanton are opposites in a number of particulars, although both successful fighting captains and players of stringed instruments). I had originally included Boccherini as an homage, but on the off chance that it would not be taken that way, I thought it best to remove.

This caused some frantic searching for replacement composers: Bach and Beethoven, for Captain Stanton (both have plenty of meaty cello parts), and Scarlatti replaces Schubert for Georgiana. The latter actually ended up being a pleasing change -- although I adore Schubert, he's really too early to be realistic (he'll certainly be making an appearance later in the series), and going with a much older composer created the possibility for a connection to Lady Anne Darcy. (Why would Lady Anne be a proficient harpsichord player, when Lady Catherine plays no instrument? I'm going to get to that eventually!) Critically, Scarlatti also had a Fandango -- although no Fandango to my mind replaces Boccherini's masterpiece, it was a suitable replacement so far as the plot for the story.

So, there are still more editing passes to go -- I want the published version of ACL to be really clean and error-free. But I am hoping to have it on an Amazon shelf near you by the end of the year!