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Welcome to the In All Jest podcast.

I'm Darryl, your host, and each week I take you on a hero's journey.

I leave my safe, normal world and face many obstacles on my quest to publish not just one but six epic fantasy novels. .

I hope you'll come along for the ride.

You can find out more information at kingdarryl.com/podcast.

Episode 11, which just happens to be on September the 11th, 2020. I've made it all the chapters are done. I'm there.

Since Last Time

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Yes, it's true. Last Sunday, I finally was able to finish all of the editing that I've done to date on the book. Post my editor, reviewing the whole novel, getting everything pushed through, and we got there. 105 chapters, 201,891 words. It's a big book. But I'm pretty happy with everything that's come out of it.

I struggled through the last few chapters over the weekend. I only had eight chapters to do last weekend if you recall. And, they took the whole weekend and that's because they were the finale of the book, the last few scenes and chapters to bring it all to a conclusion. Took a bit of time to work through, but I'm happy with the way that worked out.

I am happy that the bulk of that work was all done. On time, as I hoped for. This week is now just  about reviewing things. I'd made little notes as I was going through the edit, things to look for. Words that had changed, spellings that I was pretty sure had crept in incorrectly. So I've just been tweaking things, going through. Find, search and find, finding items, just looking at those, playing with those double checking, a few things were fully removed, um, by searching for single words that shouldn't be in the manuscript anymore.

And I will send it off to the proofreader this weekend, which is an exciting milestone to make. It's been a long time coming. And it's also been confronting. The resistance that Steven Pressfield talks about reared its head significantly this week. I had a couple of moments during the week, not just from the book, but everything that's been going on at the moment.

A lot of activity, my working life is very busy. I know during COVID-19 there's, , two extremes. There's some people that have had their businesses suffer a lot, and others that are doing  really well. . We've had plenty of work and that's been ongoing since probably March. So coupling and all of this work for the book and all these other things, I think I just hit the end in the road after the weekend. Got a little bit uptight about things, a little bit stressed about a few things. And one of those things I think ultimately is that fear and self doubt that comes before putting something out in the world. You are always confronted by that.

I've been confronted by it along the journey, but it definitely reared it's head this week.  Having to look at it, think about it and go at some point soon it's out of my hands. So there's a lack of control feeling in that, there's fear and concern and worry, about is it any good, all of those things that you play with?

, but they've created resistance -- I wanted to delay the date and go back through everything again and have another look at this and that. And really, that's just not what is going to happen. So worked through all that and got it to a point where it will go. It's definitely going to go.

So what comes next? What comes after that? Well, a proofreader will have it for several weeks. Then it'll come back to me. I need to implement her change file. There'll be markup in there I need to process. So I'll need to accelerate through that over one to two weeks and just push that all through. Make sure I'm happy with everything that's come back from there and do the final publishing phase. Which includes making sure that the elements of the cover or locked in final prints files are all organized.

I'll be getting a new print proof with everything in it. The current print proof I've got doesn't have any front matter, or any back matter in the book, there was no need at that point, but there will be. we have a graphic that's in the chapter headings, which is the logo of the Jester's head, which looks , really cool.

But I used a gray scale version effectively. It was the dark blue version of the logo. And I just put that in. It needs to be black and the gray doesn't quite work. So there's little things in there that we will be doing, or I'll be doing mostly. Then my team to help publish it will come into action and we will have it up and ready to go , on October the 16th.

I will be putting preorder up, hopefully this time next week, if not before. Getting that finalized and released this week and weekend and early next week . We'll make it available; be on Amazon and a couple of other places, probably on the Kingdarryl.com website as well.

We'll have a preorder up there which will be good. See what we get out of that. We'll need to set up a few little ads to keep that ticking along and we'll hit the publishing date and go from there.  There's really not a lot to talk about in the manuscript this week because we pretty much got to the end.

As I said, I had to play around with a little bit to get it right. I'm pretty happy now with how that all has worked out. I think it resolved better than it had originally. The first iteration through over the weekend still just didn't quite link everything together the way I'd liked. But I feel now that I've got that put together, the way that I want to, and that will lead in nicely to book two, which is known as Fool Me Twice. I'm not sure yet that i've publicly announced that I'll be putting that up that the title of book two is definitely going to be Fool Me Twice. As I stand here talking to you, I'm looking at the cover design that's printed, on my studio wall, and I really love that cover.

I love the cover of A Fool's Errand, which will be out publicly for everyone  whenever the prerelease goes up. I'll release the cover to my newsletter list the day before, and then the preorder will go up the day after. So we'll get that all out and then it'll be a matter of just watching everything, spin up and get ready to happen.

This part of the business side of me, which is keen to see the book sold.  It's not the key motivation for doing it, ultimately. The original reason to write this novel was to write the novel and to write the series. Clearly I'd like that to have some degree of success. That people enjoy the story, and buy the subsequent books. My job is to produce them and put it out in the world.  The rest of it will be what it will be, and it will be interesting to see how it's received and how it goes.

I know some of my friends don't read that style of book and they probably will never read it, which is great for them. They don't like that style of book. I don't expect them to read it. I know that others that are keen to read it, which is great too. But my primary goal would be for people I don't know that pick it up anonymously and read it and like it. That would be fantastic for me. No bias there from them at all. They just like the story.

I'll look forward to those people, enjoying the story. I'll look forward to reading it in its entirety, without editing it at some point and seeing how it pans out. I am going to have to read it once I've put it all to bed and had a week off or two weeks off. I'm going to have to go through it all again, to update the Wiki, which I mentioned last week's episode.

But it will be different at some point. I don't know when that might be. Maybe it'll be in the lead up to the final edits of book two. I might just sit down and read the book and get my head back into book one world.  that might be a useful way to do it. But I think having cleaned it up, once it's been through the  proofreader.

I think then that I will be more comfortably able to read it as a novel. The last time I tried to read it as a novel prior to this edit parts of it were really easy to read that way, but then I got hung up on things that needed to be fixed. Typos, sentences or paragraphs that didn't really work. I've had almost the last version of the map back.

We had to do a few little tweaks to it. It's about four or five little tweaks to go, and then that will be good to go. I'd like to get that out as well through my newsletter group , that might just change the preorder date. Just need to get a few of those things out to the people that have been on my little team there, supporting for awhile.

Next time around. I'll probably have much more structure to what I'm doing. This time a little bit by the seat of the pants, partly because I never really knew exactly how the timing would end up and setting the deadline was about me having a deadline and meeting it.

And that's what that was all about was making me get to this point. It does feel a little bit flat, I must say, having got here. Because there's still this gap. I have to take a break from it, which will be good. It'll be good for my mental health. Good for my physical health.

Good, just to take a week or two off as a breath, while I wait for the manuscript to come back. I definitely will not be touching book two during that time. I'll just be looking at the marketing angles and, you know, making sure the back blurb on the book is all written the way I want it, ready to go, but I won't be deep in the world.

I won't be immersed in it. Need to have a break. And so there's a little bit of a flatness, I was so involved for so long in it, eight weeks or so, where I just was on it every day. It kind of feels a little bit distant right at this moment. Like, I should feel super excited because I achieved that milestone I needed to achieve.

The reality is though that until it's published, that's the big moment. And that's the one that I'm primed to celebrate, to get excited about and take a huge deep breath over. There's no backstory in this episode today. And I will be taking a four week hiatus from the podcast because I won't be writing in any significant way over this next three to four weeks.

So I thought to not bore you to tears, talking about publishing, I'm just going to take a hiatus, focus on getting the book out the door and we'll get the podcast back on track as I launch into, Fool Me Twice, the writing of that, cleaning up the Wiki and getting that story moving along as well as  feedback about how the book is selling. Until then.

Outro