Spring is now in full throat. My favorite time of year: sweet scents, warm weather (not hot), everything is lush and colorful, baseball is starting up and people are just a little kinder. Best enjoy it while it lasts.
I am thrilled to say that I have had a chance to get a good deal of work done on the last three stages of Monarch. I've done a solid rewrite on Stage Two. This was troublesome due to the story within the story aspect of this novel. If I incorporated all of Cipher, a reader would be left with a twelve-hundred page book from a first-time author. While I would like to detail every word of that tale, it would take away from Ginger Reed's story and there would be no way to deliver it in a timely fashion. Deciding what needed to stay in and what had to come out caused more than one sleepless night.
Just waiting on my editor to give Stage Two back to me so I can proceed. In that time I have been able to also rewrite Stage Three. Fortunately, this was not as cumbersome as Stage Two and I lost very little sleep over it. It was such a pleasure to just tweak and move on, tweak and move on. However, there were a few big changes made; I had to cut one of my favorite scenes. This was frustrating but had to be done. I can't say that Stage Three was the main reason I wrote this story, but it has been the most enjoyable to write and rewrite, so far.
Over the past week I also had an opportunity to look over Stage Four for the first time in almost a year. I was worried with the arduous task of rewriting Two and relative ease of Three that the law of averages would require there to be some major problems with Stage Four. There are a couple of issues that will need to be addressed before anyone else lays eyes on it, but thankfully they are not as abundant as with Stage Two.
In addition to being able to run through Stages Two-Four, I have also uploaded a tweaked version of Stage One to Amazon. Unfortunately, they are giving me a hard time about "why" I am requesting people be notified. They were not so obstinate about my requests in December. I fear something has changed over there and that the change may affect the release of Stage Two. Grrr! Since I can't do an official pre-order I've had to do it this way. It appears I am running into my first setbacks of the year. I may have to ride Amazon's tookus for the next few months so they don't mess up the release of the next three stages.
Lastly, I have finally gotten around to doing some research for Ted's Poetry Page. It has been so long since I wrote Cipher that when I was looking through twelve-year-old notebooks it was like discovering old treasure. I came across a business card from my upstairs neighbor in California and did a Google search on her. Turns out she just released her first R&B Album. I enjoyed listening to it while reading through my notebooks. By weeks end I should have at least one more poem added to the page.
This has been a very productive few weeks. I hope that by this time next month Stage Two will be ready to go. Unfortunately, the way Amazon is dealing with my requests I fear I may not be able to release a Stage Two preview through them without hassle. I may just release a PDF on my Website like I did with Stage One. Or I might just skip the preview altogether.
What do you guys think? Am I wasting my time doing a preview? Do you even want a preview?
Enjoy the rest of your Spring.
Go Braves!
-aap
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