From Trailer to Official Edition

As the Florida sun battles the overhead fan for dominance of my outer condition, little does it do to soothe the fever that is raging within me, courtesy of my Muses.

Courage is grace under pressure.

I am currently in Key West, trying to make sense of the tasks ahead of me. The trailer version of The Life Tree Discovery is currently available on Amazon Kindle, while I am looking at the changes my three editors sent back to me. And then there's the illustrations that need wrapping up. I brought all the work with me and by the ghost of Ernest Hemingway I am going to get it done before I travel back home.

Never mistake motion for action.

The trailer version was never meant to be the definitive version of my young adult eco-fantasy. In order to beat my drive for perfection with a healthy dose of "ship-it-when-it's-good-enough" I figured it's good to have something out there, while I work on the final touches. The pressure of knowing that people are buying a raw version of my story is enough to get me back in the seat to polish it, without overdoing it.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master

Armed now with three documents I am integrating grammar, spelling and style corrections. So in the old fashioned style of doubling down and shutting oneself off from the world, my Twitter and Facebook updates have come to a temporary standstill as I concentrate on putting the final touches on words and art. Then, a new and official edition will replace the current trailer edition on Amazon, while I contract the hard copies out to a print-by-demand publisher (or perhaps a traditional one?)

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Thanks to my Muses Maureen, Steve and Sandra for all their hard work, but especially my biggest fan and first target reader of the Ælemental Journey series, my son Alex. After nights of reading to him in bed he turned out to be the best test audience one could wish for. Engaged in both the story itself and how it was told, he may be the one critic to rule them all.

Thanks monkey.