Fiction

I spent most of the day yesterday working, on a series of three books. Unusually for me, they were fiction — just text, no photographs or artwork of any kind — so they came together fairly quickly.

The process has not, however, been without it's unpleasant surprises. Text files for two of the three book had long since been lost, and had to be extracted from PDF files, created for an earlier attempt to get the books in print. (How could anyone spend all that time writing a book and not keep back-up files of the manuscripts?) The covers had been professionally prepared — sort of — but need to be reformatted to fit a different size, and reconstructed from whatever materials she has on hand. (Today, I have to see what I can do with the one that looks to have been scanned from a color xerox. Ugh.) Having to emulate someone else's mediocre design work seems nearly as time-consuming as creating my own. It's certainly more irritating.

The books are — well, let's just say they're not something I'd be all that interested in reading...

Kane Branson makes an explosive entrance in chapter one when he plants a bomb in an enemy’s car and watches from a distance as the vehicle bursts into a ball of flames. Returning home to his bottle of booze, he ponders over his beloved wife’s murder and the whereabouts of his daughter. Clothes strewn on the floor, several days’ dishes stacked in the sink, trash more than a week old; his place misses his wife and so does he. The chapter ends with him mounting his Harley, leaving that old life behind, his destination unknown."

...but the author seems very sweet and earnest (if perhaps a bit short-sighted), and she's obviously very excited that these books are going to be in print. It's a pleasure to be a part of making that happen.