There has been a lot of behind-the-scenes activity on the Curveball serial. Some of it has been for Issue 26, which I need to finish up… er… very soon, but a lot more of it has been for Issues 1-24.
I’m working on collecting Issues 13-24 into a Curveball Year Two book. Part of that was getting them actually edited, and I figured that while I was at it I might as well get Issues 1-12 edited, and re-issue Curveball Year One with all-new, cleaned-up text.
But wait… there’s more.
I figured “hey, since I’m going to re-issue Issues 1-24 with edited text in novel form, I might as well update the individual ebook issues as well. And since I’m doing that, I should go ahead and update all the freaking web pages to boot.” So that’s one of the bigger projects I’ve taken on this month.1
If you’re a Patreon Subscriber at the $1.00 tier or higher, you’ve already benefited from all this work, because the Patreon Editions are already updated in PDF, epub, and mobi formats. The web pages will be updated next, hopefully next week… and then finally the ebooks that get sold on Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, etc. will be re-uploaded.
(Whether or not those of you will be able to benefit from the re-uploaded ebooks is a question I can’t answer–Amazon tends not to update an ebook that’s already been purchased. I’m not sure what the policies of the other services are).
Finally, after all that is done, Curveball Year One will be re-issued under a new ISBN and Curveball Year Two will be published for the first time–both in ebook and trade paperback formats. I suspect this will be sometime mid-October.
For those of you who are wondering what the difference is between the version currently on my site and the Official Edited Version, the answer is “it’s pretty much the same, but better.” Basically:
- Some overlooked past tense was caught, scolded, and changed to present tense.
- Inconsistent names were changed to be consistent.
- Stubborn grammar issues were grudgingly coaxed out into the open where they were subsequently clubbed, their fur harvested for coats, and their fat boiled down and sold to oil lamp manufacturers.
- A few plot items that “drifted” slightly over the course of the story have been reined in.
- In Issue Four, when CB’s guns don’t fire because they were submerged in water (a scene that many people familiar with modern firearms have pointed out is just flat-out wrong), I have changed it so that the guns jam simultaneously (which is high implausible, but more likely than what I originally wrote).
- In general the use of italics throughout each issues was an inconsistent mess. This was because of the way LibreOffice handles styles–I didn’t understand what it was doing, so I didn’t know how to avoid what was happening. I now understand what it’s doing, so I know how to avoid the problem. And I’ve gone back and fixed everything the editor found.
- And of course other stuff that falls under the Very Helpful Category of “other stuff.”
Anyway, at this point it looks like the back issues will start being updated about the same time as Issue 26 goes up. So if you click on the tracker you’ll basically see my site going nuts as three-year-old pages shoot to the top of the list because they were recently updated with all kinds of editing goodness.
