What's that? Algiers is the capital of Algeria you say? Of course it is. The words are almost identical. Wait, what's that? I list it in Morocco?

...

*waves hand with two fingers extended*

That doesn't say Algiers, that says Marrakech. It also says red city not white. And it's near the mountains not the sea. You should really pay more attention when you read.

So I converted my manuscript to Word and fixed some of the formatting and changed underlines to italic, courier new to tnr. What I forgot to do was check the page breaks. Page breaks don't carry over consistently from OO to Word. Most times they do, but sometimes they don't. Even when they do, you don't get the dotted PAGE BREAK line but merely a hard character return that seems tougher than all his brothers, making the next line start on its own page.

And of course, I leave one extra hard return at the end of each chapter in OO in case I want to go back and add more to the end. It's faster to have an individual return to target rather than putting the curser at the end of a line and hitting return. Don't ask me, I just do better that way. Of course, in this situation, a number of those returns are the only thing on a page, so I have a few blank pages in the middle of the manuscript.

This is all neither here nor there if I hadn't sent the thing to readers. Minor mistakes, you may feel, but I think it's disrespectful to people taking time out of their lives to read something I wrote, not to mention shoddy in ways of a professional presentation of my work.

Errors have been fixed. Hopefully this is lesson learned enough I won't repeat the mistake in the future.

HOT DAMN!

I'm starting work on Dyv7-04 Throw Open the Gates of Heaven tonight. The super secret project has been abandoned. It seems that the authors that supposedly weren't doing anything still insist they are doing something. As soon as I broached a topic close to the subject, they came running saying I was treading on their turf. Throw in a few other authors at the regional level who did the same, and it's more hassle than I want to deal with it. So, funk dat.

However, I had a revelation today. I have been struggling for some time with A Circle of Crimson Stone. What's the true story? Where's the arc? What's evolving? What's growing? It seemed to be just a tale of happening, one action scene laced to another. I need more depth than that, but how? The characters I had originally planned on focusing on weren't evolving nearly as well as other characters I had planned on killing off pretty early.

Then it hit me. I had made a mistake! There is no writer's block. There is only mistakes! I had misordered a chapter. Otep has a revelation and runs for home (although showing restraint, doubting her own premonition, not wanting to lose the goats she had just gone to so much trouble to retrieve). Next chapter the Mashae are raiding a Chean tribe. Chapter after that, she comes in mid-battle, linking the two in a mighty battle.

And it didn't work! I liked the convention within that microcosm, but for the total story and the development of the characters it was completely the wrong direction to go. She needs to give up the goats (which her people depend on to survive) so she can get home before the battle has occurred. Then the battle happens and she's there from the outset, kicking all kinds of ass and taking all kinds of names.

Also, she is now officially the main character. While other characters will still get their attention, M'Buwe, Jocopo, Nahuel, Otep is the main character. And her star-crossed relationship that I never thought was working right is now canceled. It was redundant crap that I hate seeing and from the outset said I hated doing. Both of them are dominant personalities and neither would allow themselves to become submissive to another. She needs a submissive person she can dominate. So following the whole "recuperation" scene, where you're expecting the same redundant crap, she puts a dagger in the chest of one of the other main characters and then claims one of his friends as her mate.

Hot damn! I can't wait to finish this adventure so I can dive back into this. Mistakes are fixed! We're back on track. Here I come!

(And once I'm finished, this thing gets gutted hard-core so I can get the vocabulary, imagery, and cadence to a higher level. I will be the best! ;)