Hello everyone, just checking in here with some news about my upcoming self-published debut novel, “A Distant Horn”. Don’t worry, I am still planning to release it on November 1st, although my progress with the editing is going a lot slower (repeat: A LOT SLOWER) than I earlier anticipated. That’s all right, though. I was pretty good in college about spending entire days in the library or the editing bay to meet fast-approaching deadlines. So far with this project, I haven’t had to do anything like that, but have been showing it a bit more attention lately (instead of giving it to those pesky music projects).

As of now, I am some 29,000 words into my first pass of the edit, which is pretty much half way. If I want to do ANOTHER PASS (which my perfectionist self DOES want to do, ugh), then I am 25 percent done with just doing passes before handing it off to my trusty editor friend, who’ll hopefully point out all the typos and none of the plot holes. 25 percent, yikes.

I bet you probably guessed this already, but let me tell you, editing a book is no easy task. Each of my James Bond Countdown articles averages around 2,500-3,000 words, despite my best efforts to cut them down (just love those movies, I guess). Those roughly take me half a day to edit, clean up, and come up with pictures. While I won’t have to find pictures for “A Distant Horn,” it’s around 57,000 words, which means it’s like TWENTY James Bond articles, which is a HUGE amount of work. For some reason I thought editing a book was going to be easy. Just fix a thing here, fix a sentence there. Oh, but wait, I forgot, I CHANGED THE ENTIRE BACKSTORY. Oops!

The work is fine in itself, but a lot of times when I have free time now, I want to do absolutely nothing at all. After your day job, you don’t really want to come home to that unfinished riff or that unedited chapter, that has been waiting there all day with an expectant look because you didn’t work on it YESTERDAY, either. Sometimes you just wanna cook your sweet potato and watch “Frasier” all night, you know what I’m saying? And despite my temporary disinterest in doing this work, I know that I HAVE TO if I want the end result to be as good as it can. It’s like being your own boss, but the only worker is you, and lazy, and doesn’t wanna do anything.

So the clock is ticking for “A Distant Horn”. I have 175 days until my projected release of the book (thank goodness I didn’t make any more promises this year). Will I be able to make it? All I have to do is finish the first pass, do the second pass, draw up the map nicely, give it off to an editor, go over it again, make sure everything is perfect, then hand it off to my graphic designer friend, get a cover from the artist (is he still in the USA?), make the pdf, order a couple proofs to see if its good and then publish it. TOO EASY!

Thank goodness I at least have the first draft of the map, which I decided to draw up at work over the course of a couple days. Marion, the crazy, fantastic world in which “A Distant Horn” and it’s two sequels (DON’T EVEN WANNA THINK ABOUT THOSE ATM!) was finally being realized. It’ll have to be re-drawn on the computer, of course (hire someone to do that?), but I think it’s a pretty nice first draft. Check it out and stay tuned!

Oh, and please, wish me luck. I’ll need it!

Sincerely,

Casey Poma