Loremaster Revisited

So maybe a story week was a little ambitious considering my current project.…

But, I am happy to say that my current project is now my finished project! Yesterday afternoon, at about 3:45 PM, I put the finishing touches on my Loremaster manuscript. About another half hour was spent fiddling with fonts and type sizes. I ended up settling on the standard Times New Roman and reduced it from a 12 to 11 pt font. By changing it to 11 pt I was able to reduce the overall length of the manuscript from 618 pages to a much more manageable, and more cheaply posted, 513 pages. I also spent some time, actually about 45 minutes, finding and replacing all those words that are different in British spelling than American spelling. I’m talking about words like “honour” and “armour” and changing them to “honor” and “armor”. In a fantasy novel where one of the major characters is the personification of knightly conduct, there were a lot of changes to be made. At the end of it all I figure there were about ¾ of a page of “u” s that vanished from the U.S. version of the manuscript.

Yesterday, around 4:45 PM, with disk in hand, I walked into one of our local printers. This morning I returned to pick up the manuscript. There’s something profoundly weighty about 513 pages that you have painstakingly written and revised and revised again. The manuscript sits here at my side waiting only for a cover letter and a synopsis before being bundled up and sent screaming into the world. That's it in the photo up there...

Now that Loremaster has been effectively put to bed it is time for me to move on to other projects. One of these projects is to get started on my short-story-a-week program. This week’s story will be set in a little village I’ve created called Mitchell’s Crossing and center around a former ballerina with a wooden leg. Guess what her first name is...

I’m also going to get started on either the flesh-out of Patriot or The Platinum Ticket or I’ll start working again on a novel length piece of fiction I started last year called, Nothing’s Made To Last.

There are a few things of note going on in my little town this week that I’d like to pass along. The Elora Writers Festival takes place this Sunday. I understand there are still tickets available and you can follow the link to the web site for more info. My wife and I went last year and it was a great experience. If you find yourself in the neighbourhood this weekend, plan on attending.

Also going on in my township of Center Wellington is the annual general meeting of the Outdoor Writers of Canada. The membership are meeting here from Thursday till Saturday in a variety of venues. It’s nice to see our little town snagged a convention usually reserved for places like Montreal or Victoria.

There’s a lot more going on that I’ll cover in the next post but for now that dancer with the prosthetic limb wants to shake a leg…