Well, Its Coming Along!

Greetings again, to all six of you readers!

It's rather amusing, when writing this Blog, to realize that only six people read it!  Obviously I can't encourage any more readers to come check it out by writing anything here!

Luckily, I get a lot of satisfaction in just writing the books; so it doesn't matter a huge amount how many people read them!   (I guess I just conflated the readership of the books with that of the blog, for which there is no good reason, really.)

I'm doing two sorts of things when editing the books, apart from checking the grammar and the syntax, and the spelling, that is:  Firstly, I try to unwind a lot of the flashback there was.  There still is some, which would be difficult to rip out without making a mess.  For instance, there is this episode where Helen goes camping with a couple.  It is mentioned in about three, or even four places, and I decided to just leave it there; it is too hard to make things perfect.

Secondly, I actually introduced an episode or two that had not been in the manuscript at all.  This would make the story a tad longer, but at the moment, we have it down to 136,000 words, give or take a few, and about 300 pages in Word.  (I set up a page size that would be nice to read on a tablet, if I converted the book to Pdf, which of course I'm not planning to do for Smashwords.)

I have to take breaks from the editing, because the last thing I want to do is to get Helen Fatigue, which is a weird phrase that comes up in the story, incidentally.

Well, that's all for now; I might be done with this work much sooner than I expected, but you don't get to see it before June 21, 2019.

Thank you all for your support; I really appreciate it!


Added later (2019/4/18):

I have just uploaded a new version.  In this one, I rearranged the chapters and sections still further, to prevent zig-zagging up and down the time-line.  The downside of doing that is that a silly little episode that means almost nothing in the right chronological spot can be referred to later, whereas I had initially included it as a flashback, downstream.

Let's give an example.

Helen has a half-sister, Tomasina, whom everyone calls Tom, or Tommy.  Tommy and Elly, Janet's daughter, were born on the same day, and grew up together, and were called The Twins, for obvious reasons.  From the time they were twelve, they were sort of an item, until in their freshman year they had a falling out, and went to different schools, and Tom became a wild and crazy character.  Then Tom meets a girl called April, and falls for her like a ton of bricks.

Then word comes that Helen has had surgery for a brain tumor, and that they're going to show still photos on that TV show in which Helen used to act, where they change the story line so that Helen's character has an accident, and is in hospital.  (Tommy is furious, but April, once she learns which character Tommy's sister (whom April has never met) plays, is confident that, if Helen were to be asked, she would approve of it.)

Well, I went ahead and actually inserted a paragraph, at the right time, saying that Galaxy folks had come in and taken some stills.

You can see how inconsequential it is.  In this case, it really is inconsequential, but in other cases, those early events sometimes foreshadow important later happenings.  So there's a lot of summarizing of early stories, but I expect readers can skip that stuff if they really want to.  Let's face it, folks, this is not a thriller.  This is just how Helen manages to get her life together, after losing her memory for the second time.

[Warning:  I'm going to do at least one more revision.  I want to start the book out with an interesting passage, as they do in some books.  It's kinda dreadful to start with Helen's early days, and work up to the present!  I know, I did labor over getting it this way, but the early years are so boring!!!  OK, maybe I won't do that.  Only cleaning up grammar, spelling and syntax.]

Kay Hemlock Brown