The Great Debate Paperback/Nightfire III, IV, and V

Today I spent all of my energy formatting and doing legal stuff for June's trade paperback release of the second edition of The Great Debate. The cover art went up on glennsladeclarkjr.com today. It's only slightly different from the hardback cover, due to spacing. Probably unnoticeable to anyone who isn't just flat out scrutinizing it.

 

Note that probably the tiniest bit will wind up trimmed from the top, right, and bottom by the printing process itself. Once this is out this summer, the Clark Ink publishing plan for The Great Debate will be complete. I likely won't even think about tweaking this book again for another ten years or so. The only thing I'd like to still change at this point is the grayscale. I wanted color illustrations from the beginning. We tried it for the second edition, but it was too expensive. We couldn't do it "small press" without charging about $70 a book, I think it was. So, grayscaled the illustrations remain. But as they say, a work of art is never truly finished, only abandoned. I'm not sure who actually said that, originally. I first heard it in a Hellraiser movie. :)

Does it strike anyone that emoticons have become a near-legitimate part of our punctuation? How long until college papers require them to denote tone? How long until we start using them in the dialogue of our novels? Our language is constantly evolving, both spoken and written. I won't be surprised by anything. I just hope I can keep up. :P

I also added some plot points to my outline for the next three volumes in The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas. Specifically, I added to the points for Volumes III and V. Four has the fewest plot points right now, but they are rather exciting ones. Basically, the "B plot" that couldn't actually run second to either of the "A plots" it seemed to be coming together with got squeezed into it's own story in Volume IV. It's a pretty exciting story. I'm actually worried about what "B plots" can stand alongside it. I think actually writing Volume III will give me a lot of the expansion material for Volume IV. Volume V already had an interesting plan, so I already know a lot more of the specifics there.

I plan to call Xlibris tomorrow about sending all of the files from the first edition of Cry, Wolf. I did actually scan the entire novel recently, but I feel like drastically reformatting it from its scanned form and polishing up the text at the same time is perhaps a great waste of time, when the option is there to simply have the files sent. I tried this before, and the files never arrived. I'll have to mention that.

I haven't done anything with The Legends of Nod recently. I'm just determined to get all of this formatting work on old projects behind me, so that I can give all of my attention to writing. I made an exception for Nightfire outlining, because it was, as I mentioned in an earlier post, leaking out of my ears.

Just know that I am busy, and that everything you've been waiting for from me is, in fact, on the way. I am trying to get back to every live property just as soon as I can and working on them all on a rotation from there so that there aren't any more crazy long waits between novels. :D

TTYL! :)