Gonna, wanna, gotta....

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Christmas coasters begun months ago, finally finished in time for the holiday.

Having spent the morning formatting a manuscript into what will be uploaded as a published novel, I have scrolled through that story a few times, adding page breaks between chapters, centering chapter headers and making the font large as well as bold. I added the title and end pages, and for now have included the first chapter of my next book, we'll see if I'm brave enough to release that into the wild, lol! Then there's the scan where I'm looking for any extraneous misspelled words, underlined in Word's red squiggle. Plenty of gonna's, wanna's, gotta's, lotta's, dunno's.... But fortunately nothing other than those colloquial uses within dialogue. Lots of them to be sure, plus a horde of then underlined in green. Word suggests and then instead of my preferred solo then. I don't bother changing that trove of alleged errors. Anything underlined in blue gets investigated, (and) then the whole enchilada is saved, stuck on a flash drive, and in a week I'll pull it out again, tweaking the Liner Notes at the end.

Thus is how I prep a manuscript for release, altering a document long considered as an under construction draft into a final version. These three novels were originally written in Open Office, but after my Ubuntu machine died, revisions took place on my Windows machine. The first two books uploaded just fine, and I'm hoping That Which Can Be Remembered does the same. Open Office didn't alert me to the gonna's and wanna's, nor did it point out grammatical mistakes. I enjoyed using it, yet I also appreciate the finer points Word possesses when it comes to spelling and grammar. I don't like how cranky Word gets because I'm using an old version of it, ahem, but beggars can't be choosers.

We're heading out of town at the end of the week to spend time with our eldest and celebrate some birthdays in that family. I had wanted to get this novel in a formatted state before our trip, and am pretty pleased to have made so much progress. December might seem a strange time to release a book, plenty of other items on the docket, yet I like the idea of ending the year with a new story for readers to enjoy during the holidays, as well as the finishing touch to another twelve months of my life as an author. Assuming I include the first chapter of my next book, I'm sort of committing to writing its sequel, ha ha, which theoretically sets up my first fiction project for 2023. When I get home from our travels, I'll sit down with that draft, then decide how committed to it I truly am. Thank goodness there are a few days between when we return and the release of TWCBR.

Perhaps that sounds a bit flaky, but I know better than to overthink things. I wanna write that story, but I gotta feel good about it. It's gonna be one of those kinda things that, oh I dunno, really grabs me. Maybe it has, perhaps I'm fooling myself. But if nothing else, That Which Can Be Remembered is in the homestretch, and in ten days you can claim your copy on Smashwords, hehehe!

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