Upcoming Novel - Done Editing!

As I've mentioned on the blog, I've written a quasi-cyberpunk novel. It's actually a bit less punk and slightly more noir. 

We're finally done editing. It's amazing how long this takes. My wife has read it twice. Five different friends have read it. A professional editor went over it. All of those folks found typos, missing words, spelling problems, or ambiguous phrasing. Each pass over the book has resulted in tangible improvements. 

And yet, we still found a few problems in the last read-through we did.   My wife and I took turns reading the book aloud, and I think that helped catch a few.

Still, I'm reasonably confident the text is ready for the public. This last pass only found five real errors. Maybe we're still missing a couple, but we're well past the point of diminishing returns now.

The next step is to format it for e-publication. Ugh. I HATE this step. It's awful. It's amazing how hard it is to get text to look right. I wrote the book in Google Docs and we can't find a common format between GDocs and ePub that doesn't mangle the text. Maybe one ignores font changes. Another one did all this insane kerning th at made it Iook IIke this se ntence . Others ignore the intended page breaks between chapters, even though the original and target formats both support page breaks. 

So what you end up with is having to convert to this other format, and then make edits in that format. This sucks because then the release version of the book is stored in this final format that isn't compatible with any word processors. And before you suggest that I should have used Word / Open Office to write the book: I did that for my last novel and got the same result. 

I strongly feel that our currently technology level should allow the translation of TEXT between formats without doing something obviously destructive to it.

Arg.

The goal is to release the book before the end of the year. Fingers crossed!