Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Well, the major edits are all done. They were due on the 17th. I turned them in late Monday night, but haven't updated here for a while. A cold ran rampant through my house this past week and my quarter was ending at school. It's amazing how these 8th graders miraculously turn in all this work when it comes down to the wire. So, I've been chained to the computer for grading and not anything fun. According to my editor we now go through "line edits." I'm guessing that's looking for continuity errors, grammar issues, and punctuation. There shouldn't be that many grammar or typing errors. The English teacher in me made certain that I read through the whole thing at least three times before I turned it in. That was after putting in the major edits! I've learned a lot, though. I'm finding I pay a lot more attention to POV, action verbs and just making the draft cleaner. After line edits, the mauscript will be given an official release date. So...

Ever had one of those experiences where the villain is turning out to be a much more interesting person than the hero? I remember when I went to a book signing by Laurell K. Hamilton a couple of years ago. My sister in law and I sat in the audience for a couple of hours and she talked about her Anita Blake vampire series. I was interested to learn that the main vampire character Jean Claude was never supposed to make it this far in the series. She laughed and said that she knew she should have killed him off because now the sneaky French bastard had stolen the entire series. I thought of that while editing yesterday. It's been a while since the first draft of Ribbons , but Captain Nelson Rawlins was supposed to be the big bad guy--the hero's childhood friend who betrayed friendship for duty. The man dedicated to hunting down the highwayman and dragging him to the dock. However, I found, when I was writing, there was a lot more to Rawlins than met the eye. I liked him. He did...