inverarity | Entries tagged with aqatdr

AQATWW: Word Shuffling

I am working my way through Alexandra Quick and the Wizard War, doing my first editing pass. So far I am mostly just going chapter by chapter fixing superficial things and shuffling words around. I'm about 25% of the way through.

"Word shuffling" is actually a very bad habit during early stages of writing. It's always easier to go back through what you've already written and find sentences to tweak than it is to write new sentences, and you can (and I do) easily spend an entire evening just poking around with rewrites. You should not do this! But for some writers (like me) it's an itch that's hard not to scratch.

I wasn't entirely successful in avoiding this trap during the first draft, but I did usually manage to force myself to keep going rather than revising. The downside of that is that now there is a lot of mess to clean up.

Right now I'm still doing "easy" revisions. Questions I never really answered remain unanswered, plot holes I haven't plugged yet are still there. I will have to address those during or after my first pass.

This light editing pass has already reduced the word count to 384,568. That's over 4000 words trimmed so far! Of course when I start doing the "heavy" edits I might end up adding a new chapter.

Alexandra Quick and the Deathly Regiment

My test proof of Alexandra Quick and the Deathly Regiment arrived!

Print copy of Alexandra Quick and the Deathly Regiment

Cover page for Alexandra Quick and the Deathly Regiment

Alexandra Quick and the Deathly Regiment - Innocence

Chapter 12 of Alexandra Quick and the Deathly Regiment

These are chonky books! The print quality (from Ingram Spark) is not bad, but it's not great either. These books won't stand up to rough handling or being slung around in backpacks, and as you can see, the art could be sharper. But you can print your own copies with the downloadable PDFs I provided here. You will have to provide your own cover (the full-resolution cover is an exclusive I reserve for friends and a few other folks), but anyone can do this with a Print On Demand service like Ingram. The setup cost for me was $49, and the cost of printing and shipping one copy was $19.40.

Alexandra Quick and the AI That's Getting Better At Hands

Stable Diffusion is still too much fun, and still hard to wrangle, but here are a few more sneak previews of AQATWW as SD starts to replace Poser as my digital tool of choice.

Madam Erdglass

The ebook and the print-ready PDF of Alexandra Quick and the Deathly Regiment has been updated, now fully illustrated with chapter illustrations by Sam Gabriel. You can download them from the link in the sidebar.

I greatly appreciate any proofreading efforts. Anyone who finds a typo or even the smallest error in the layout or typesetting can request by email the full-size cover image and/or print-ready PDF that goes with the book:

Print cover for Alexandra Quick and the Deathly Regiment

Print cover for Alexandra Quick and the Deathly Regiment

I will soon be ordering my own print copies. I only print a very small number, for a select few folks. However, you can use these files to print your own from a POD service. (Previously I printed using Lulu and Barnes & Noble, but the only POD service that seems able to handle a paperback book over 700 pages long is IngramSpark.)

Epub and print-ready PDF versions of Alexandra Quick and the Deathly Regiment are now available in the downloads folder.

These are not final drafts. There are no chapter illustrations yet, and they haven't been thoroughly proofread. That's where you come in! Please let me know if you find any formatting errors or typos.

Alexandra Quick and the Deathly Regiment ebook cover

Alexandra Quick and the Deathly Regiment frontispiece

When the chapter illustrations are complete, I will upload the illustrated versions, and I will be printing copies of AQATDR as I have for the first two books.

I have just uploaded Alexandra Quick and the Deathly Regiment as complete ebooks to my box.net fan fiction folder. (The link to my downloadable ebooks can always be found under the "My Stories" menu of this LJ.)

As with previous Alexandra Quick books (and Hogwarts Houses Divided) there is both a PDF version, which includes all the chapter illustrations I posted here previously, and an unillustrated epub version more suitable for small screens.

Enjoy, and please let me know if you find any errors/bugs/typos. Also, rather than sending copies of my ebooks to others or uploading them elsewhere, I would prefer that you distribute the above link instead, since I do occasionally update those files when I find a new typo or formatting error.

Charming drawing by Becca, aka clabbert2101, of MNFF

I am actually rather agnostic about both the Word of God and the Author Is Dead, but I do believe that a story should stand on its own, without intervention, explanation, or clarification from the author. You may not care or want to know what Inverarity intended, what Inverarity was thinking, or how Inverarity feels about what he wrote. If that's the case, no problem, and if you still have critiques, lemme have 'em. But if you don't mind having your reading of the book "tainted" by the author's voice, this is my big rambling tl;dr Author's Notes on Alexandra Quick and the Deathly Regiment, in which I will answer questions (but not give any extra-book "canon" information) and discuss my reasons for doing certain things. All below the cut...

Above the cut, though, a special mention to people whom I've mentioned before but deserve mention again: my betas, Miles2go and

swissmarg. They pointed out everything from typos to plot holes, and the result was absolutely a much tighter story. For those who say that my writing has improved since Alexandra Quick and the Thorn Circle, I'd point out that AQATTC was never seen by betas or anyone else before I posted it online.

Also, I neglected to mention (gotta fix that when I post revised versions of the entire story) that the reference to "dead man's finger" in the last chapter of AQATDR actually came from

swissmarg's story Survivors, which is the only Snape/Hermione story I've ever read that didn't suck greasy hairballs. (I still think Snape/Hermione is complete mindfuckery, but seriously, Survivors is a good story.)

Second, a shout-out to

anthonyjfuchs, the diligent maintainer of the Quickipedia, which I'm sure will be useful to those of you trying to remember who's who and what's what when you come back to Alexandra Quick after a year or more. Although it's a public wiki, and therefore open for anyone to contribute, almost all of the work has been done by Anthony. (I occasionally make small corrections, but otherwise try to leave it alone.) Yes, I actually named William's familiar in his honor. Anthony has recorded nearly every little detail about the AQ universe revealed in the books so far. (Though I notice you never did catch the passing mention of the names of two of the Pritchards' brothers. ;))

All right, on to the authorial pontificating...

( In which I pontificate pontificatingly )