Hallelujah!

Considering that we’re in the Easter season, the title of this post seems particularly apropos. In addition, a few days ago I finally wrote The End to the draft of Valley of the Shadow. Talk about excitement! I truly felt like breaking out into the “Hallelujah Chorus”! With all the unexpected twists and turns this installment of the series took me on, and all the resulting recalculations I had to make, I was beginning to wonder if I was ever going to finally get it done. 

Just figuring out where to break the realigned storyline to create a logical ending was an ordeal. The word count was already higher than I wanted by the time I got to the end of December 1777, blowing away my original plan to end right after Monmouth at the end of June 1778 with a temporarily—the operative word here being temporarily—peaceful conclusion for my characters. But I managed to bring it to what feels like a nicely suspenseful ending—albeit another cliffhanger, which I was hoping not to do after the last one!—late in February 1778 without getting to Daughter of Liberty’s final word count of 127,000+, which admittedly is ridiculous!

Now it’s time to slash words. There are places where the narrative gets down into the weeds, and I’m going to try to condense, streamline, and extract details that don’t really have to be there. But first I’m taking a break for a couple of weeks. I want to be able to come back to the story relatively fresh, with a more objective perspective. And I have several friends—God bless you!—reading through it as well to give me their feedback, which will enter into the final edit. 

After I have final text I’ll flow it into my page-making software, QuarkXPress, Marisa will add the back and spine to the front cover, and we’ll be ready to go to print. And, of course, my friend John McClure will turn it into the ebook files asap. Before that’s all finished, however, I’ll already be working on research for book 2 of the Northkill Amish Series, The Return. And then back to book 6 of this series, Refiner’s Fire. I’ll tell ya, an author’s work is never done!

By the way, Valley of the Shadow is now available for preorder! For some reason Amazon doesn’t have it discounted, but Christianbook.com has a very nice price. Check it out!

March Drawing # 3!

I apologize for being so late in posting this drawing! Boy, was it ever a busy weekend—chock full of company and family events and very enjoyable—but now I’m behind and a bit crazy!

The drawing this week follows the usual format: Leave a comment on this post to be entered to win a copy of the new Heritage edition of Wind of the Spirit, Book 3 of the series. And, of course, if blogger gives you grief and you can’t leave a comment, you can message me on Facebook to be added to the drawing.

This week I’m offering another bonus. In addition to Wind of the Spirit, the winner will also receive both book 1, Daughter of Liberty, and book 2, Native Son! So you’ll have the first three books of the series for yourself or to give as a gift!

For those who want to earn extra entries in the drawing, we’re going to do a game—sort of a scavenger hunt. Four questions are below. You’ll find the answers on one of my websites, either www.theamericanpatriotseries.com or www.jmhochstetler.com. Each right answer will earn you 1 entry in the drawing in addition to the one you get for leaving a comment. Please email the answers you found to me at americanpatriotseries[at]gmail[dot]com or message me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joan.hochstetler so no one else who enters can see them. Don’t want anybody to cheat. LOL!

Now get to digging!

Extra Entry Questions

1. Give the name of the artist who painted “Patrick Henry Before the Virginia House of Burgesses,” depicting Patrick Henry's "If this be treason, make the most of it!" speech against the Stamp Act of 1765

2. In Wind of the Spirit, which character accompanies Elizabeth on the journey into Ohio Territory to find Carleton? You only need to name the main one of the three men who accompanied her, though I’ll accept the others too.

Who said “We Recognize No Sovereign but God, and no King but Jesus!”

When and where did my ancestor Jacob Hochstetler arrive in this country with his wife and 2 small children?

Register to Receive Free Chapters!

Concerned about the continental drift taking place in this country today? Worried about the upcoming election? Ready to revolt? Then return to the days of the Continental Congress, when our Founders arrested the downward slide and set America on a new course. Join the rebel spy Oriole’s elusive band and start your own Revolution! 

Just click on the link and register to receive free chapters of the new Heritage Edition of Daughter of Liberty weeks before the release date. You’ll receive an email with a PDF of Chapter 1, and then for every additional 25 registrations, we’ll release a new chapter, which you’ll receive automatically. Spread the word and share The American Patriot Series Facebook page to release chapters even faster! The person with the most referrals will win a free copy of Daughter of Liberty!

And be sure to watch for announcements about drawings for a free book and signing up to receive free chapters of Book 2, Native Son!

New Covers!

You saw it first here, folks: the new covers for Daughter of Liberty and Native Son!!! I am ecstatic!! My designer, Marisa Jackson, is the BEST, and these covers are top of the line!!!

So give me some feedback. What do you think? I’d love to get your reactions!!

Daughter of Liberty Video Trailer

At last! It's finished! Not that I really had time to play around, mind you, but all work and no play makes Joan a very dull girl. So I made time.

Unlike with the Wind of the Spirit trailer, this time I wasn't really happy with my attempts to create a script before constructing the video. So finally, in frustration, I tried adapting what I did have to the images I could find. That included the existing cover of DOL, which will be changed out as soon as we have the cover for the August release of the new edition.

Finding appropriate images for historical novels is a pain in the kiester, to say the least! But once I had the images, the script sorted itself out. The final result required a lot of tweaking, and I’m not completely satisfied with a couple of the images, but all in all I think it turned out not too badly. Here’s what I ended up with.

1. Eastertide 1775

2. British warships blockade Boston’s once-thriving port

3. while the Regulars occupy the city

4. As the conflict builds to a deadly confrontation

5. Elizabeth Howard plays a dangerous game

6. By day she flirts boldly with British officers

7. and by night, as the elusive courier Oriole

8. she smuggles intelligence and weapons to the patriots

9. Her most dangerous foe, British Major Jonathan Carleton

10. threatens to expose Oriole’s true identity

11. When the first blood is spilled at Lexington and Concord

12. and Elizabeth is drawn into the carnage of Bunker Hill

13. Carleton sacrifices his life to save hers

14. Can she rescue him from the hangman’s noose

15. and her heart from his keeping?

16. The nation’s epic war for independence begins . . .

17. Book cover

18. Credits

Finding the music was the real head-banging ordeal. I went back to my usual hangout for music, audiosparx, and filtered through beaucoup snippets of song without finding anything that really spoke to me. When I was just about ready to settle for one that I felt would really be better for Native Son, I decided to give it one more try.

This time I found a piece titled “Gathering Strength” that felt just right. And it lined up perfectly with the images with almost no tweaking. Wooo hoooo! Talk about serendipity. The only hang-up . . . $149. Yikes!!!!!! Even at the lowest level of rights it was the same, unlike the fabulous one I found for WOTS that started out at $172 and ended up something like $28. Oy veh!. Then I noticed that they allow you to bid on audio if you don’t want to pay the asking price. So I bid what I thought was reasonable for my use and the owner took it! I was in business. And here’s the result. Give me your feedback!

Speaking of video trailers . . .

If you’ll remember, last year around this time I did a series on the book trailer I created for Wind of the Spirit. You can see the results at the bottom of this page. Well, I had so much fun creating it—never mind the frustrations—that I kept thinking about creating trailers for Daughter of Liberty and Native Son too. And after I posted them on Kindle, the urge became even stronger. As if I don’t have enough to do. But a lady has to have some playtime too, right?

Anyway, what really got me excited about doing a DOL video was a trailer on YouTube about the Scott Brown campaign for Ted Kennedy’s senate seat in Massachusetts back in January. I didn’t stumble across it until shortly after the election, but I thought it was fantastic, and I immediately decided it would make a great “template” for my own purposes.

Here’s the video, “Massachusetts Miracle.” Regardless of your political views, you have to admit that it’s tightly written and compellingly done. I especially like the music, which ties the images together very effectively.



I started working on the trailer a few weeks ago, but then got bogged down. But the “Too Late to Apologize” video stirred the muse into action again. So in my next few posts, I’m going to document the creation of the DOL video to ensure that I get it done! Unfortunately, however, NS is going to have to wait. When you’re as technically challenged as I am, putting one of these together takes a while, and if I’m ever going to get Crucible of War written, I need to limit my playing around!

Kindle Links at Last—Maybe

Well . . . Amazon finally released Daughter of Liberty and Native Son for Kindle . . . but for some reason, the price isn’t available. And they’re not showing up on a search of the Kindle store, though they do show up on a search on my name.

As I promised, here are the direct links.

Daughter of Liberty

Native Son

I’m really curious to know whether it’s possible to download these books to the Kindle even though the price doesn’t show, but obviously readers are going to want to know what they’re paying. They’re $8.99, just so you know. If you try to download either of them, I’d appreciate your feedback. In the meantime, looks like I need to get in touch with Amazon once again to see if it’s possible to get those prices up there.

Kindle Crisis

I was hoping I’d have better news by now, but we’re making progress, folks, really we are! I uploaded the Kindle version of both Daughter of Liberty and Native Son a couple of weeks ago. But because they were previously published by Zondervan, the good folks at Amazon, conscientious as the darlin’s are, dropped them into the dreaded—and apparently endless—review process.

Thanks to John McClure, our expert at Signalman Publishing who transforms our books into the Kindle format and who is the repository of all knowledge Kindlewise (thank you muchly, John!!), I obtained the highly guarded, eyes-only e-mail addy for the dtp support staff. I assured them I do indeed hold the publishing rights, and they responded with a request for Zondervan’s return of rights letter a short time ago. I immediately scanned the letter and sent it to them.

Hopefully we’re finally on track now to get those titles up and running on Kindle within the next few days. As soon as they’re available, I’ll post the direct links here.

In my next post, I promise to bring you up to date on my progress on Crucible of War. Alas, however, that’s going to have to wait until I get through the yearly tax travail. Sigh. If all goes well and I survive, I should have that mess off my desk sometime next week. Can you tell this is just my favorite time of the year?!

Going Electronic

After getting requests for the Kindle version of Daughter of Liberty and Native Son, I decided to go ahead and have books 1 and 2 converted since Wind of the Spirit is already available in that format. It’s sold a few copies, and e-books are grabbing an increasingly larger market share, so now is a good time to make the first books available too.

I finally finished the updates of both books—and rediscovered how much I love this story in the process! Releasing the electronic version will get them out there early for fans of the series who have a Kindle. If you’ve already read the books, you won’t notice much difference in the new versions. The changes are pretty subtle. Of course, the printed books will be the same larger trim size as Wind of the Spirit and will have covers that have a consistent look.

For the Kindle version, I’m going to have to use the same old Zondervan covers that I was never happy with from the start. If I had a budget and time in the schedule to produce new covers for these books, I’d do it, but the existing ones will have to do for now.

The books will be up on Kindle sometime around the middle of the month, and as soon as they’re available, I’ll make an announcement here with a link so you can go directly to them. So if you’re eager for the electronic versions, be sure to check this blog regularly.

New Editions

In case I haven’t mentioned this before, we’re planning to release new, slightly updated editions of Daughter of Liberty and Native Son at some point in the next year or two—the exact date is still on the drawing board. As soon as we find a slot for them, I’ll announce the release dates here as well as on my Publishing Dream blog.

The new editions will be done in the same size and with covers consistent with Wind of the Spirit, including a larger font to make them easier to read. Zondervan, who published the first 2 books, made the text awfully small in order to keep the page count lower, and that’s something I’ve been wanting to fix for a long time. So as I can squeeze it into my schedule, I’m digging back through the manuscripts, correcting minor details and adding a bit here and there. Most readers who’ve read the original versions won’t notice the difference, but I’m incorporating some newer research to make the text as accurate as possible.

DOL has been finalized, but I’ve only gotten to chapter 7 in NS. In the meantime, I had an illustrator recreate the maps, and I just got the final files. So naturally I want to share! Aren’t they pretty? We added a few new details to the originals. Joseph Warren’s home has been added to the Boston map, and Tess Howard’s mansion is on the Boston area map. A few other features have been added as well.

I’ve always loved maps. A detailed map is a wonderful aid to help you orient the action in a historical novel, and these ought to help bring the story to life even more vividly.

After some feedback from a reader, I’m seriously considering having both books converted to Kindle format. WOTS is already available, and on Kindle the text can be enlarged to a comfortable size. It isn’t terribly expensive to have the text converted, but it’s another item that has to be shoehorned into the budget, so it may be the first of the year before they’re available in that format.

And then the question arises, what about Barnes and Noble’s new e-reader, and Sony, and so on. So far the books we have up on Kindle haven’t sold well enough to justify the expense, but they have to be marketed just like a print version, so that’s another thing we have to think about. If you have an opinion, please post a comment and let me know what your feelings are about e-books vs print books.

Upcoming Events

I’ve been out of town for several days, incorporating a visit with friends with a speaking engagement at a book club in the Warner Robins, GA, area. I had a great time while there, and the presentation to the Houston County Book Browsers went very well, with a number of the ladies buying my books. But the 7 hour drive home yesterday through storms was not nearly as enjoyable. It was a relief to finally get home safe and sound! And now I’m rushing to get caught up on the day-to-day minutia, as usual!

If you’re going to be in the Nashville area this coming Saturday, October 3, please join me and several other authors from the Nashville Christian Writers Association for a book signing at 21st Century Christian, 2809 12th Avenue South, Nashville, TN 37204. I’ll be signing copies of Daughter of Liberty, Native Son, and Wind of the Spirit, along with One Holy Night.

Also signing will be Darin W. Montgomery, Membership Guide to the Body of Christ; Dr. Etido Akpan, Strategic Alignment: The Business Imperative for Leading Organizations; Carol Harper, Through the Eye of a Needle; Robin Miller, A Biblical Journey of ABC’s; Sandy Griffin, Free to Be Me: Creating the Dance of Your Life; Chris Fenoglio, Kristin and the Santa Secret; and Catisha Asbury, Jesus Child: Christian Urban Poetry, Volume 1.

An American colonial and Revolutionary War reenactors event will be going on at the same time in Hendersonville. The annual Daniel Smith Colonial Days Reenactment and Fair takes place October 3 and 4 at Historic Rock Castle. I plan to drop by before or after the book signing or on Sunday as reenactors bring to life the period from 1779 to 1820. I attended last year’s event and it was excellent! This year I’m hoping to get some good high res pictures that I can use for covers for my series, including the new editions of Daughter of Liberty and Native Son we’ll be doing within the next couple of years. Bob Dulany of Dulany Printers, who participates as a reenactor, also has wonderful pictures available. Either way, I’m going to have excellent choices for covers for the entire series.

A final note: Although One Holy Night didn’t win the American Christian Fiction Writers Book of the Year contest, I’m very honored that it was a finalist along with 4 other excellent novels in the Long Contemporary category. My heartiest congratulations go to Sharon Hinck whose novel Symphony of Secrets took top honors!

Finding Elizabeth and Carleton

Finding images to represent my hero and heroine turned out to be a lot more difficult than I’d anticipated. Because the story is set during the American Revolution, I had to have models who were costumed consistently with the era. The Native American frames, which I’d thought would be my greatest challenge, were taken care of, as were all the rest. How hard could it be to find a couple of 18th century portraits that would do?

First I tried a quick search on my old standby, istockphoto, to see whether I might be able to score real-life models more along the lines of Philip Winchester. Umm . . . no. Searching for both male and female models netted me faces that looked way too modern, even when no costume was visible in the photo. Dear Philip pretty much ruined me for the men, and hardly any were blond anyway. Don’t even get me started on the subject of the women who turned up, especially their hair styles. And every one of the people in their small selection of American Revolution images either had their backs turned or their heads cut off. Sigh. A general search on male models turned up . . . well, let’s just say I don’t want to go there.

Obviously, the only way I was going to find models in authentic costume was to locate 18th century portraits that fit my characters. I searched until my head swam and eventually came up with Sir George Kneller’s portrait titled Lady in a Green Dress. I was immediately enchanted. She’s lovely, and she IS Elizabeth! In fact, I’m thinking I may hire an illustrator to recreate her in the proper context for the Daughter of Liberty cover when we publish a revised version next May. Happily, although the portrait dates to 1703, the model’s costume is neutral enough in style to be acceptable—and it’s green, Elizabeth’s best color.

One down, one to go.

Finding Carleton was an entirely different matter. I soon discovered that most male portraits from that period are of men who are considerably older than Jonathan’s 33 at this point in the story. Undoubtedly that’s because they had arrived at a station in life where they merited and could afford to commission a portrait. I found a few of younger men . . . but how can I phrase this delicately? Umm . . . judging from the sample I found, British men of the period were, shall we say, not what most of us would consider model material. And there were very few blonds. It was mainly a choice of dark hair, red hair, or white wigs. Alas, Jonathan is decidedly blond.

I spent so many hours online searching for just the right man that I began to seriously consider just going with the photo of Philip Winchester in his Crusoe persona. But there was no getting around the copyright issue, alas. Not to mention that he’s way to recognizable, and a movie/TV star is not what I wanted to portray my character.

Back to the search. I scoured numerous museum Web sites, searching on well-known artists such as Gilbert Stuart, Charles Willson Peale, Joshua Reynolds, Jonathan Singleton Copley, and others. And this time I finally came up with a couple of possibilities. The leading contender quickly became a portrait of Captain George K. H. Coussmaker painted by Joshua Reynolds in 1782. There were several issues with this image, however. First, George is just too young. And he’s too pretty-boy pouty to be quite right for Carleton. Worse, he’s dressed in British uniform. Admittedly, Carleton was a British officer at the beginning of the series, but he was in the 17th Light Dragoons, not the First Regiment of Foot Guards. Helmet, not cocked hat. The uniforms are also different, though most viewers won’t know that.

On the plus side, he’s posed with a bay horse—white blaze, not black like Devil, but nevertheless, it’s a nice touch. And even though his hair is frizzy where Carleton’s is perfectly straight, it is light enough to be considered blond, especially once I did a color correction in Microsoft Picture Manager. Okay, so you can’t have everything. He does look mighty good in those tight white breeches and knee-length black boots. And considering that I couldn’t find anything else remotely acceptable, and most museums—the Met again in this instance—grant usage of images for non-commercial and/or educational purposes, I decided I’d agonized over this video long enough.

It turned out that once he was in place, George was small enough within the portrait’s context that the details were less noticeable. The whole worked well enough that I quickly became reconciled to losing Philip.

That left one last detail: the audio line. More about that tomorrow.

Definitely a Go!

Earlier this week, my account rep at Christian Book Distributors e-mailed to ask me for a detailed 60-90 word summary for Wind of the Spirit. Hmmm . . . they wouldn’t be asking for that unless WOTS was definitely on track to be featured in their summer fiction catalog! Needless to say, I’m thrilled!

Just as exciting, Joy DeKok, our marketing and promotions expert at Sheaf House, is working on an ad campaign for our spring list, and WOTS will be featured in a full-page Sheaf House ad on the back cover of Home School Digest’s spring issue. It includes the covers of the first 2 volumes and a blurb about the American Patriot Series directed toward homeschooling parents and students. This is a giant step toward accessing a market we’ve been wanting to reach.

And wait until you see the postcards Dineen Miller is designing for me! They’re gorgeous! I can’t wait to send them out to libraries and bookstores and tuck them into copies of WOTS I sell personally so they can be handed on to others. Dineen is attempting to shoehorn the text I sent her into the available space—I ended up trimming it down again, and hopefully this time it’ll fit. Not that I tend to be wordy or anything! LOL! We’ll have just the essentials on the front, but once I upload it into VistaPrint’s template, I’ll squeeze in as much information on the back as I can, and then it’s off to the printer!

I also heard from a new fan this week who just finished Daughter of Liberty and Native Son and wanted to make sure WOTS is on track for the March release date. Indeed it is! We’re expecting delivery to the warehouse by the 20th. How exciting is that?!

Finishing Up Production

We have the final full cover for Wind of the Spirit! Isn’t it pretty? This book is going to look as good on the back as it does on the front. LOL! Dineen did a smash-up job, and needless to say, I’m completely delighted with the result. And now I’m hoping I’ll be able to release the first 2 in revised editions before too much longer—with new covers consistent with this one, of course. That will be a huge improvement.

More excitement—Jim Brown, my illustrator, finished the 2 maps that will be included in the book. As you can see, we have one showing the Battle of Brooklyn and another of the city of New York in 1776. On the latter I had him include Montcoeur, the home Elizabeth and Tess are leasing along the bank of the Hudson, which allows Pete and Elizabeth to leave the city unnoticed for their clandestine activities. What do you think?

I’ve been deep in the throes of production this week. I received the edited copy and spent several days entering the corrections into the master file. Thankfully there was nothing major, which is especially reassuring, considering that my editor friend is as anal as I am. She did a careful copyedit, questioned a few details, and made several good saves, for which I am eternally grateful. I soooo believe in having your work professionally edited, even if you’re an editor yourself. There’s always stuff you’re going to miss. So whew! I feel much better!

The manuscript is almost complete now. I created all the frontmatter pages—the endorsements, title and half title pages, imprimatur, previous books page, and pages to insert the maps. I also decided to add a page with brief summaries of Daughter of Liberty and Native Son to help bring readers who haven’t read the first 2 up to speed before they dive into the current action. Although I included enough backstory in the first few chapters to allow WOTS to stand alone, I thought this might help even more.

I still need to write the discussion guide and the acknowledgments. I can flow those into the Quark file after I get it, however, so I’m putting that off for now because I NEED to copyedit my next project for Sheaf House. So the Word file has gone to Marisa Jackson, who will design the interior and create the Quark file.

Earlier in the week, it occurred to me—duh!—that I’ve been lurking on the 18th Century Woman and RevWarCostume e-loops for a couple of years, metaphorically rubbing elbows with all those reenactors, docents, and costume experts. Who would be more natural to read WOTS and let me know if there are any costuming or cultural details that are wrong? And who might also spread the word about the American Patriot Series to their compatriots if they like it?

So I e-mailed both loops, offering to send free copies of Daughter of Liberty and Native Son, along with the manuscript of WOTS to anyone who would be willing to read them and give me feedback. I’m up to 11 takers now, 2 of whom had already read DOL and NS and couldn’t wait to read WOTS! I’ve been busy sending out packages, and I’m really excited! At the very least I’ll get help to make this series as accurate as possible. At best, I just might get an endorsement or two out of the deal, along with recommendations to an audience I’m very eager to reach.

Designing the Wind of the Spirit Cover

Cross posted on Publishing Dream.

We all know that creating a striking cover is one of the most effective tools for marketing a book. When I worked at Abingdon Press, getting approval for a book cover was one of the most important and stressful hurdles we faced. So when I began thinking about the cover for my own next project, Wind of the Spirit, I ran right into a question that stymied me for a while.

How do you illustrate a title like Wind of the Spirit?

Well, obviously the cover has to give an impression of what the book’s all about. It has to basically encapsulate the story’s theme and focus. How to do that with this particular book was the issue.

One thing I’ve heard from a number of readers and authors is that they prefer book covers that don’t include people. Trying to capture the characters in the book is iffy because everybody is going to have a different take on them. Especially the author, as I discovered while wrestling with Zondervan over the covers of my first two books. So I do agree it’s more effective to engage readers in the story by allowing them to visualize, and thus identify more closely with, the people they find on the pages of your book. It makes reading more interactive, and that draws the reader into the story.

The cover designs of my first 2 books in this series were essentially out of my control. Zondervan gave me some input, but at the end of the day, it was their marketing department that had the final say. Now, as a publisher I know marketing considerations are very important in the design of a cover. But big publishers put out a whole lot of books, and too often it’s the same old same old, the easy, hopefully safe bet, the publisher ends up going with. In my case, I was never happy with the covers on Daughter of Liberty and Native Son though admittedly some of my friends developed a passionate relationship with the model on Native Son. Okay, I’m teasing, but they did like him. A lot.

Now, however, I face making the right decisions myself since I’m the publisher. And that’s even more stressful than being stuck with a cover you don’t care for. What cover would have the best odds of selling this book?

Well . . . I came up with this crazy idea . . . Yeah, right. So what else is new? LOL! You knew that was coming.

I’m not going into all the details of what we’re planning at this point—once we have a final cover, I’ll post it, of course. But in doing extensive searches on istockphoto, I came up with these 2 images of the same scene in portrait and landscape orientation. They’re perfect for the front and back of a book cover. The first one even has black bars across the top and bottom where the title and author name can go. And the one in landscape orientation gives us enough of the scene to wrap around the spine and back cover. Of course, we’ll have to ghost that portion—put a screen on it—so we can run text legibly across it, and it will be just visible in the background.

The crazy tree that sticks up is going to be eliminated. And there will be a figure and some other detailing in the scene itself, but it will all be subtle and full of motion. Dineen Miller is working on the overall design, and she enlisted Frank Wu, who is doing the magic with the images. They think they can achieve the look I want, and I am totally excited at how this is developing!

Isn’t this scene amazing! Strangely enough, these photos were taken in Kenya, but I was so captivated by the powerful image of a gathering storm that I knew this scene gave just the right feel of foreboding and movement that I was looking for.

So what do you think? Will this make a fabulous cover or not?

The Dreaded File Corruption Meltdown

I had almost finished my editing pass on Wind of the Spirit—only a couple of chapters to go. Lately I’ve been reading David McCullough’s 1776, which covers the period I’m writing about. And after running across several good details that would fit nicely into the narrative, last Tuesday evening I went back to the beginning of the manuscript to add those.

As I scrolled down through the file, I came across a section where the text had corrupted into a symbol that looked like y’s with a couple of dots above. That was followed by lots of page breaks with no text. ACK!! I scrolled down to where the text began again and saw that an entire section was missing. NOT what you want to have happen when your editor is waiting for your manuscript.

Worse, I quickly discovered there were two more places where the same thing had happened. And these were more important and complex scenes that I sure didn’t want to have to try to recreate from memory.

I immediately checked my flash drive. It had the same version of the file I was working on, including the corrupted sections. I raced to my laptop. It had Sunday evening’s version of the file . . . also with the corrupted sections. So I’d saved the file at least a couple of times since then, each time overwriting the file with the defective one. And I didn’t have a hard copy printout. After all, I had 2 backups, didn’t I?

I confess, at that point my brain paralyzed, and I started hyperventilating. LOL! Anyone who’s had something similar happen with an important document knows exactly how I felt. I immediately put out a request on my writers’ prayer loop. The prayers must have helped calm me down, because I suddenly remembered that my friend Lori—who is writing an even bigger and fatter historical than mine—and I have been exchanging chapters as we’re writing our respective projects. Talk about a brain freeze! Holding my breath, I e-mailed her to find out if perchance she had saved any of the chapters.

In the meantime, my husband reminded me that all three of our son-in-laws are computer experts and suggested I call the one who lives just down the road, who writes software. Well, duh! His suggestion was to google “corrupted Word file.” That brought up a number of suggestions as well as several free downloadable programs that promised to fix the file. Well . . . after a couple of anxious hours of fiddling with it, nothing worked!

Back to e-mail. Thankfully Lori had saved every chapter I sent her. Praise the Lord and good friends! I was able to reconstruct the file from the rough drafts of those sections, and evidently I hadn’t changed much because the original text looked fine to me the way it was. But at that point, I suspect any reasonable proximity would have looked good. After replacing the wrecked sections and rebuilding the file in open office, I saved it back to Word and sent it off to my editor. What a relief to have that project off my desk for the time being!

This volume ended up at 105,000+ words. That’s about 4,000 words more than Native Son. Daughter of Liberty, however, weighed in at 127,000+ so this is a mere novella by comparison. But I’m very pleased with how the story turned out. I think this may be the strongest book in the series so far.

It’s strange, but often as I reread manuscripts I wrote a few weeks or months earlier, they seem not to have come from me. I’m astonished at them. I know they passed through me, and I even remember the words. But they don’t seem like mine. It’s as though they belong to someone else. Did I really write that? I know I didn’t create it, in spite of all the work I did on it. I wonder if it’s that way for other writers. Do they feel like their stories are a gift that flowed through them but came from a mind other than theirs?

All I know is that the Lord touched me mightily as I was writing Wind of the Spirit. And I pray this story and the entire American Patriot Series will touch readers powerfully as well.

Editing Book 3

The rough draft of Wind of the Spirit is finally finished! I’d celebrate if there weren’t so much left to do to turn this project into a physical book. When I hold that puppy in my hot little hands, I’ll really celebrate.

This has been a long time coming. It’s been a winding trail that led around many roadblocks and sidetracks. But as I always say, God has a plan, and that plan is going to be accomplished, no doubt about it!

To read the first couple of unedited chapters, go to my Web site and click on the link in the box about WOTS. I’ll put up the edited chapters as soon as we have a final version.

In the meantime I’m starting the next step—making my own editing pass before it goes to my editor. I know this sounds pretty much like cleaning your house before the housecleaning service arrives. But being an editor myself I like to turn in a clean manuscript. Even more important, I want to make sure I’m satisfied with my character and plot development, have smoothed out the language, and caught any factual or continuity errors. If I do a good job, it makes for less work when I receive the final edits.

I started a few days ago and so far have gotten through Chapter 5. Sigh. Obviously this is going to take a while. The trouble is, I’m constantly bombarded with Sheaf House and personal business as well as the need to do promotion for my latest release, One Holy Night. With this book I have a total of 101,500 + words to work through, which is long enough, but not really all that long as far as historicals are concerned. But then, my friend Lori Benton and I love those BFHs (big fat historicals). She’s writing a really BIG one!

I was hoping I could get WOTS to the editor by June 1. Well, I’ll be lucky to get it to her by July 1, which is cutting things close with her schedule as well as mine. It could be worse, though. Book 1, Daughter of Liberty, was over 139,000 words when I started, and it ended up at a bit over 127,500. Thankfully I don’t anticipate cutting much out of this one. Native Son was just a bit over 101,000 words too, which will make these two books the same length.

Of course, WOTS started out life as the last third of NS that got cut off because of the publisher’s word count restrictions. Too bad I didn’t find out about that until I’d turned in the manuscript! It was a bit of a shock to find out they’d decided all their novels had to be kept to 90,000 words. Yikes! I managed to wring a concession out of them that NS, being a historical, could be around 100,000. And after much agonizing, instead of gutting my story by cutting out all the secondary characters and plotlines and a considerable amount of the main storyline, I decided to lop off the last third of the book, write a new ending for NS and a new beginning for WOTS, and then flesh out what I had left.

All in all, I think that decision turned out quite well, especially since that publisher ended up canceling the series anyway. I would sure have been upset if I’d ripped NS to pieces for no good reason. Since I didn’t compromise the story, in this volume I’ve been able to give a fuller account of Carleton’s life among the Shawnee, Elizabeth’s relationship with Vander Groot and her involvement in the Battle of Brooklyn, and hers and Andrews’s journey into Ohio Territory to find White Eagle.

I originally intended to include the Battle of Trenton in this book, but with a major battle at the beginning and time running out on my deadline, I decided to end with the lead-up to Trenton. That should make for an exciting beginning to book 4, Crucible of War. The only caveat is if I keep this up, I may end up having to add another book to the series. And since everyone who’s following along knows they’re going to have to wait until the very end for the resolution of Elizabeth and Carleton’s relationship, that’s something nobody wants to happen—especially me since I’m the one who has to write the durned thing! LOL! I seem to be making a career of the American Revoluton. Happily it’s a crucial and fascinating era that is easily holding my interest.

Enough for now. I’m going to dive back into Chapter 6 this evening and see how far I can get. So far I’m quite pleased with how the story developed. I think this is going to be a truly exciting installment!

In upcoming posts I'll include some short excerpts from the text to whet your appetite. But in the next post I’m going to talk about something really exciting—the cover! How in the world do you illustrate Wind of the Spirit????

Stay tuned for some hints . . .