Heather Masterson

Reviewed another proof yesterday. The interior is fine, it’s the paperback cover I’m obsessing over. It’s not even the front cover, it’s the back and spine. Teeny-tiny little tweaks that probably wouldn’t even be noticed. This proof was cut badly, unfortunately; I’m guessing the ginormous printing machines are miffed at me. The spine text ended up slightly off-center, so naturally, I lost my mind.

Reality: The cover is fine. It’s been fine for a while. I just can’t seem to leave it alone, because I’m nuts.

Also reality: If I’m this buried in minutia, everything is probably fine. I just can’t see that yet, because I’m too busy losing my mind.

More reality: I can’t control the ginormous printing machines.

Derek’s always telling me that I have to learn to let things go.

I’m always telling him, “YEAH, THAT’LL HAPPEN ANY DAY NOW, KTHANXBAI.”

In other news… one of the characters in the second book is making my brain explode. I was about 30k words into her bit when she informed me that I wasn’t getting her voice quite right. I broke my rules and went back over it… and dammit, she’s right. I was getting closer as I went along, but there’s a lot of stuff at the beginning that needs to be tweaked — in those early bits, her rhythm and vocabulary were a bit off. The big question: leave that for the second draft, or do it now, while I’m thinking about it?

Second draft. I really want to do it now, but the whole point is to keep the momentum going, so it’ll just have to wait.

I thought about taking a pic of my day-job desk, but this is the only part that’s remotely interesting. It’s a cubicle. It’s designed to be uninteresting. Grey on gray trimmed in pale grey.