Okay, that's three chapters down and we are at the end of the year.
I hope that Santa was good to you - or who ever or what ever is appropriate to you for this season.
Here I am at my last planned author's note for the forseable future. No doubt there will be others and I will be doing an insight post following the next chapter, but right now I don't see a pressing need for any new author's notes after this one.
I rather think that the title of this post kind of sums up the philosophy I intend to cover herein, but allow me to go over it in greater detail.
I have no proper editor. I am a one-man-show over here. But I am, like all of us, fallible. There are a dozen or more obvious ways I could make mistakes - even if I'm being careful - as I put this trilogy together. And there must be gadjillion additional ways I could screw up with increasingly unlikely (though non-zero) chances of occurence.
This is where you come in.
If only I had the legions of fans that Star Trek garnered which eagerly dove in and dissected all the contradictions and errors in their ever-increasing millieu. They of course didn't have my advantage of being able to go back and correct their errors, having committed them all to permanence on celluloid. I however have much more ability to adjust. I will be relying on my readers to help me ferret out the most egregious mistakes, and with three chapters in the bag, it's time to open those doors and start that process.
Copy Editing
Inevitably some of it will come down to simple copy-editing. I do run a spell-check before I publish chapters, but that's hardly fool proof. Even if I did have perfect spelling and an equal grammar knowledge base I would miss things due to familiarity. There will be times when things are deliberately wrong - especially, but not limited to dialogue. (But don't let that possibility hold you back.) I welcome and encourage all input on these things. Simply point out the error in the comments of the appropriate post and I shall deal with it.
I am not in the habit of deleting comments on any of my past blogs (unless they are spam) even if they are unfairly negative. I can imagine a future where I would want to clean up the comments on some posts simply because of a long string of people pointing out a deliberate grammatical error, or if there are comments about spelling mistakes that I have long since corrected (like anyone would really want to waste their time reading posts about errors that no longer exist!) So, for now... if you have a spelling or grammar correction to pass on please put it in a separate comment from any other points you may want to make. Hopefully I can find a more elegant way of dealing with this in the future.
Contradictions
In an ideal world I would never write a word that conflicted with a single other thing I have to say. But that simply isn't a reality that I live in. If you happen to notice a place where I have contradicted something I've previously said or otherwise thrown conflicting data into the story, by all means point it out to me. There is a chance it will have been by design, but in many cases it will be an artifact of simply having too many details to keep track of and I'll find a new way of achieveing the same narrative goal.
The fact that I will at times have to go back and retrodict portions of the plot makes this even more likely, though it also allows me plenty of freedom to correct any errors that crop up in the process.
I suppose there is a chance I could decide that a detail is simply too small for me to be bothered with, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Logic, Reality & Science
I am a big fan of science and reason. But there is also a need to tell a good story and there are often parts of any tale where either a blind eye must be turned or a game of "what if" is being played. This tale has some big "what ifs" in it and I must embrace them in order to tell the story I am telling, but within that context I want to hang on to as much reality as possible. I can't be an expert in everything, so I will be interested and open to hearing any and all opinions as to how I can improve the realistic parts of my story. By now it should be clear that there are some elements that have virtually nothing to do with the world we actually live in (and there will be more to come). But even these I wish to make as plausible as possible with the science we currently understand. So I am always open to your feedback.
Character, Plot Arc & Tone
While I can't please everyone, and my number one goal is to please myself... errr... that sounds dirty... Uh... I am interested in what other people like and hate and imagine the future will hold for the people in the world of Necropolis.
I don't see any of these types of suggestions as "errors" per se, but I am very open to your general feedback. By all means. If you think the plot should feature more Edmond and less Sylvette, or the other way around, or the same for any of the other characters yet to make an appearance - tell me! If you find that you lost interest after a particular event then let me know. That is the information that is most important to me. I am not going to overhaul my entire trilogy to please a loud minority, but it could positively influence things that I am less committed to in the narrative. As much as this is about me writing the story I want to write, it is pointless to write it if I am not writing a story someone else is interested in too.
Like everything else in this project, this is all subject to ammendment. But for now, I invite you to play by these rules.
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