Awesome cover.

My friend Andy Zeigert has come up with a very professional looking cover to Led to the Slaughter.  It's so good, I'm inspired to go back and give the book one more rewrite.

It's so good, I'm going to go ahead and have some physical copies made when I'm done and sell them out of my store.  (Still months away.)

I seem to be in a quality control frame of mind.  I'm trying to improve Faerylander, of course.  And I want to improve Led to the Slaughter.  I want these books to be as professional as possible, now that I'm going all-in on publishing through Sagewind Press.

I'm looking at designs and fonts and overall looks.

I'm also doing those last things I know the books need but which I was a too lazy to attempt before.  I want to go back and give Led to the Slaughter an old-timey feel.  Take out any modernism's I find, try to seed in some 19th century words, give it a more 19th century feel.  I'm going to try the True Grit trick of taking out contractions (which often forces me to change the wording.)  It's a fairly dangerous thing to do if I don't get it right.  Like trying to write colloquialisms -- if you do it poorly, you're better off not doing it at all.  But the book will move to a higher level if I succeed.

I'm seeing now all the benefits of having written so much last year.  It's a baseline to improve from.  I had to get those words down first -- now I can take the time to polish them until they are something people will take seriously.

Yesterday was an interesting experiment in polishing.  I would normally have just written the two parts of the chapter and then moved on.

But I decided to put them on Facebook, and suddenly I'm paying much more attention -- finding lots of copy-editing errors, and in the process of fixing them, often finding better wording.  Adding and subtracting because I'm aware that people are reading it -- right here, right now.  Really focuses the mind to what is on the page.

I'm not going to do this will all my writing, of course.  I'd wear people out pretty quick.  But it points out that writing can and should be improved when you know other people are about to read it.