Somewhere around June I changed prices on books 2, 3 and 4 to 99 cents for a while. I forgot to mention it the other day, but they're now back to normal price, $2.99. Amazon wanted me to go $3.99 for maximum profit. Interesting, but no. I'm starting to see a lot of books for $3.99. Still, no.
The mystery/romance is in a state of hibernation while I decide what to do with it based on a piece of negative feedback concerning an aspect of the story. At one point there's a bit of supernatural intervention to make sure the heroine chooses the right romantic interest. In so many words, a test reader didn't think marriage is important enough for God to do that, or people wouldn't be marrying the wrong person all the time. Personally, I think God intervenes all the time. It's just not as blatant as I portrayed it. I've been leaning toward making it less supernatural and more like what we see in real life.
I would've gotten more done if I hadn't broken a tooth and had to wait until I could get an appointment. Talk about tired. I felt worn out almost all the time. I'm feeling better but not 100%.
I follow this guy on twitter who has tons of money. One Sunday he tweeted that he broke a tooth. About five hours later he tweeted again that the dentist had fixed it. Dentists around here don't work on Fridays much less Sundays. Wouldn't it be nice to have that kind of money? :)
I've been working on the sequel, although the tooth interfered a lot. I'm trying to raise the quality of my work. Something I'm paying a lot of attention to is structure. Novels, plays and movies typically follow a standard 3-act structure, which can be broken down into minute details that I wasn't aware of until recently. Book 1 has two distinct storylines. I wasn't sure if the whole book should be in three acts or if each storyline should. I asked story structure guru, K.M. Weiland, who wrote a book on structure and was generous enough to answer my questions. There's more than one way to do it. I'm treating each storyline almost like it's its own book. Is hearing this like watching sausage being made? My approach was to make two extra copies of the rough draft and cut them up until each held one storyline. I've gone through one. I'm still going through the other.
It's been hard not to make corrections, so I've kept the master file open in the background. In one place a character is talking candidly about the past. There's a sentence that said, "I've evil done things" instead of "I've done evil things." How does that happen? That's probably the worst thing I've found. If it doesn't sound great, it's a rough draft sentence. It may not make it to the final draft. Literally every sentence has to be gone over.
Until next time.
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