Still Working Frantically Away

The weekend was a welcome break from all the stress of the past week. Most of the stress was technology related. The .pdf converter was being... maniacal. I finally, it seems, figured it out and the .pdf copy has been approved by Createspace.com. Now I have to order the second proof and cross my fingers that I caught everything the first time around.

A note on my self-editing abilities - I have none.

It's something I'm working furiously on improving, and there is some (a very little, but some) improvement there. The funny thing is, this anthology (you do know I'm talking of The Dying God & Other Stories, right?) had been through no less than four (count 'em - four) Beta Readers and I still found a spelling error and a whole bunch of formatting issues. Those, however, were likely a result of file corruption from the number of times I've saved the files as something else, copied and pasted the text into different applications etc.

Technology... shudder.

In any case, it should be all fixed now. It seems I'm more capable of seeing errors on paper than I am on the computer screen. I will order the proof on Thursday, since that is when I get paid and, unfortunately, I have to purchase the proof and pay for shipping etc. The costs of self-publishing.

Speaking of the costs of self-publishing, I'm struggling to fix a price for the book. I don't want to charge a whole lot, otherwise people just won't buy it, but I do want to charge a fair price. I've put a lot of work into this.

I have to book listed tentatively at $10.95. Does that seem reasonable to you? I could really use some help with this. Any thoughts from other authors who've gone the P.O.D. route?

Still on the subject of The Dying God & Other Stories, the second last part of my ten part serial at All Things Books is now up for reading. Just click HERE. Part nine is a rather sad section of story, but the best one in my opinion.

If you've only just realised that I've serialised the titular short story from the anthology soon to be released in paperback (boy, that was long-winded), never fear! I have gathered all the links to all the sections in one convenient place just for you. Click HERE for the links.

Of course, with all the new edits I've made to the proof of the paperback edition of my anthology, I'm now paranoid that those same mistakes are present in my eBook editions. So, I'm going to go through them today to make sure they aren't, and to fix them if they are.

That achieved, I'll be hopefully free to begin editing a new section of work a friend sent me to review for him.

Of course, my actual writing is once again on the back-burner. I'm giving myself permission for the rest of the week to work on the more immanent stuff before starting work on Puppet Master again. Next week, I should be back into the writing with all of this The Dying God stuff behind me.

This is a ridiculously long post. To make things even more absurd, today's Forgotten English is also ridiculously long:

Abacot

A spurious word which by a remarkable series of blunders has gained a foothold in the dictionaries. It is usually defined as "a cap of state, wrought up into the shape of two crowns, worn formerly by English kings." Neither word nor thing has any real existence. In [Edward] Hall's "Chronicles" [1550] the word bicocket (Old Fr[ench] bicoquet, a sort of peaked cap or head-dress) happened to be printed abocket. Other writers copied the error. Then [in 1566] Holinshed improved the new word to abococke, and Abraham Fleming to abacot, and so it spun merrily along, a sort of rolling stone of philology ... until Spelman landed the prize in his "Glossarium," giving it the definition quoted above. So through [the dictionaries of] Bailey, Ash, and Todd it has been handed down to our time, - a standing example of the ... ponderous indolence which philologers repeat without examining the errors of their predecessors. Nay, the error has been amusingly accentuated by ... a rough wood-cut of the mythical abacot, which in its turn has been servilely reproduced.

- William Walsh's Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1909