Today I returned from school to find that my publishers have finally completed the copyedits for Bran Hambric: The Farfield Curse! In publishing, a copyeditor reads a manuscript even deeper than a normal editor does, checking for everything from consistency mistakes to style errors all the way to the gritty commas and exclamation points (of which I had many). A copyeditor also helps me make sure that everything lines up perfectly, and really adds the final bit of polish to the book before it goes off to the printers:

Visualization for what Copyedits do

So, as today is Friday, and these edits are due on Monday, I am barricading myself in my apartment with the Lemony Snicket soundtrack, as much Anberlin as one soul can take, and all 115,000 words of my book. My goal: to attack it with as much ferocity as I can muster whilst living off microwave Mexican food and macaroni for two days and three nights. My editors left no stone unturned, as evidenced:

Copyedits for The Farfield Curse

Each red marking is from one editor, and each blue marking is from another. I have two days to read and approve each edit — and the photo above is just two pages out of nearly 400! (ADDED: It should be noted, however, that every single quotation mark in this entire novel had to be changed to a different style, so the majority of those marks above are from that!)

It’s actually one of the most important steps in this process. A copyeditor can’t even change anything in the story, but they correct so many tiny mistakes that even after years of my editing, most of the manuscript looks like the two pages above! I have to approve or reject each change to make absolutely sure that everything stays exactly the way I intended when I wrote the book.

In OTHER news, my friend Kaza Kingsley has her first two Erec Rex books being re-released on April 9! Kaza and I met just after I signed with my agent, and I saw her book EREC REX: THE DRAGON’S EYE at a local bookstore and decided on random to write to her. She replied to my email, and we became good friends over the internets (she later got me as the designer for her book’s official website!). By amazing chance, she later signed with my literary agent without even knowing, and he sold her series to Simon & Schuster for re-release. If you like books with epic quests and boy heroes and dragons, you should definitely check her books out next week!

By the way, I had to turn in another project for my photography class today! The assigned concept was to show motion with shutter speed, either by freezing it or by having a little bit of blur. Tell me what you think of these (click to see them bigger):

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Posted in Bran Hambric, College, Writing
Tags: Bran Hambric, Kaza Kingsley, Sourcebooks, Writing

As you have perhaps noticed, my official website now has a new design and layout; shorter header, wider content, etc. The main new stuff is the front page, which I’m still working on a bit to get out some of the bizarre busyness, though I suppose it could also serve as a good comparison to my life at the moment. I can’t wait until summer break, and those glorious months of time to actually get caught up on things. My to-do list has been monstrous and disorganized lately, as displayed in this nifty little illustration:

Don’t ask  me why summer causes my life to turn into something resembling modern art, but at least it’s more organized than the beastly thing to the left.

The redesign of the site is part of my new self-help program to get me to blog here more often than in recent months. Of course, to blog here something interesting and epic has to happen: after March 6, I have a feeling there’s going to be lots more of those types of things going on, since stuff will really get moving for the book. On March 14, I’m officially getting my author photos done by a professional, and I’ll be posting the results of that soon after as well!

FYI to all, I’ve got a live BlogTV show coming up this Saturday (Feb. 28) at 7PM CST on my channel. These shows are always loads of fun — they’re mostly centered around my TwilightGuy readers, which is why I haven’t announced them here, though as the slow transition goes into getting ready for the book, there will be loads of shows focusing on the release and news (perhaps one on the fateful and upcoming March 3, which will be exactly 6 years after I first started the book!).

Planning ahead for this Fall, I had an idea for a possible release party for The Farfield Curse as a live BlogTV show (one of those things I’ll be discussing at the publisher’s meeting in Chicago next week) which would mean anyone from any country could attend. Plus, having it online would mean I get to avoid the inevitable event of showing up at a bookstore with a table of my books, a smile, and a signing Sharpie; only to have no one but the store manager and my great-aunt Tootsie show up, my Sharpie go dry and unused, and my smile to slowly melt into a morbid frown, as I stare blankly ahead at what I suddenly envision as the long and tortuous future of the New Author In Town.

Not My Aunt Tootsie

Nightmarish happenings aside, I can confirm certain going-ons with The Farfield Curse, namely that I have received a number of pencil sketches from the illustrator, one of which will become the cover of the book in nary a few months (done in full color, of course, as our secret illustrator has won awards for I might add). Also, I have gotten word that pre-orders of the book could start as early as May/June. Exciting? MUCH.

Other exciting news: TwilightGuy.com just passed 3 million hits last week, around the same time my Youtube videos passed 2 million combined views. I love the word million, especially when referring to such things as web hits/views/copies sold, etc 

And, if you haven’t seen Slumdog Millionaire yet, you should do it before something awful happens and you miss your chance. Honestly one of the best films I’ve ever seen.

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Posted in Bran Hambric, College, TwilightGuy
Tags: Aunt Tootsie, The Farfield Curse, Writing

Apologies for not posting! This is due to me having three biology tests, an English paper, an English poetry assignment, a critique, two chapters in psychology, an 85-page book to read, an interview for a website in Belgium, a 14-page publicity questionnaire from my publisher, edits on my book, and a haircut… all due by this weekend.

Seriously, I would skip posting for no less!

Along the same lines, to the people who have sent mail to my PO Box in January/February, I will be getting back to you ASAP. This month has just been an overload of things to do, but I’ve got all your letters and packages and photos sitting next to me on my desk and I promise to answer them all.

(cross-posted here)

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Posted in College

Look at all the SNOW!

Can’t see this? Click here.

If you read my blog regularly, you’ve already heard about the preview chapters and the songs, so the news is for my Youtube peoples.  And yes, that’s the amount of snow it takes to shut down a college campus in Texas

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Posted in College, Videos
Tags: College, Poetry, Snow, Snow Day, Texas

Wowsa, what a busy year this has become. It seems like at this same time last year, I was lounging about with hardly any homework, hours upon hours of writing fun, and bits and pieces of even more spare time between to eat lasagna and explore. Now, I’m lucky if I can snatch enough time to write a simple blog post. What changed? How did this travesty of a schedule become imposed upon myself? It makes me recall the reaction of my professor from this time last year, after a group of students (myself included) confessed that we had gobs of free time on our hands:

It was just as encouraging back then as it sounds now. The most dreadful part of it is that her words came true, as evidenced by my lack of posting this semester.

Anyhows, I have some bits and pieces of news and stuff people might enjoy, whilst we wait for that cover art and release date on my book (I’ll know mid-March, I’m hoping?). First off, I just added another one of my songs to Youtube, with the corresponding link to download the song for free:

[click here if you can't see the video]

Also, I’ve finally decided to open up the gates and just let people download preview chapters for The Farfield Curse from my website! Before, I wanted everyone to email  me and request them, so that I knew who had the chapters and when they got them (I don’t know, I just like knowing I suppose). But with the number of emails I’m getting per day now, it’s just impossible to reply in a timely manner, and people are waiting for months just to get the chapters, which I have been informed is like getting one of these and then being banned from feeding it raisins for months.

So, from now on, if you want the preview chapters, you can head on over to this page and download them for free! I’m not advertising these preview chapters too much (it’s not being linked on the Bran Hambric site yet) since they’re not edited, but for the people who read my site I’m putting them up a bit early.

Back to music again, here’s a clip of an entirely new song that I am working on for the Bran Hambric soundtrack. I get the feeling that this will be the final one I create for The Farfield Curse, since I have 8 or 9 songs already, and I have an urge to start making new ones for Book Two . Here’s the clip (or check out the song’s page):

Tell me what you think the comments!

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Posted in Bran Hambric, College, My Music, Videos
Tags: Bran Hambric, College, medusa, music, My Music, Videos