I ghost-wrote additional chapters for a client today–five hours’ worth.  I’ll wrap it up tomorrow or later tonight if he gets back to me to let me know which final topic(s) he wants me to tackle for the last five or six pages.  (He wants the book thick enough that Createspace can put the title and his name on the spine, so we had to “fatten it up” by 4,000 words to make that happen. It was about 12,000 words in length. Now it’s closer to 14,000 and needs another couple thousand, probably.)

Tomorrow at 10 a.m. Pacific Time I’ll be Skype’ing with a potential client who’s presently residing in France.  We connected on Upchuck (not the real name, but close enough for government work). It will be 7 p.m. her time when we connect. She wants me to edit/enhance the copy on her website. When I looked it over, I agreed that it needs a professional’s touch to help it do what she wants it to do. She wants to discuss her vision for it before I get underway, so we arranged a chat.

The galley proofs of DeForest Kelley Up Close and Personal are supposed to arrive tomorrow between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m., too, so Monday is going to be a busy day for me.  I have until midnight Tuesday the 29th to make any last-minute changes to the manuscript before it goes into the final stages at Createspace and can go live on January 8th, the official launch date.  (It’s possible to pre-order the Kindle version already, but the printed versions won’t be available until the 8th.)

I need to get another good night’s sleep tonight.  I slept well last night for the first time in a week. I’ve had Christmas Tree Brain (high anticipation syndrome) for almost a month, which has made it almost impossible to get to sleep before 2 a.m. or to sleep past 7:30 a.m., so I’ve been running on adrenaline more than sleep for far too long.  It’s a good thing I don’t publish books more often: I don’t sleep much in the weeks before a launch!  Giving birth to a book is both awful and awesome. Everything else I do to make a living has to stop while the final touches are put into place. Additional income stops, to all intents and purposes: there is only one of me to ride herd on the details.  Thank God for Lisa Twining Taylor for doing the re-formatting and proofreading (to make sure there aren’t errors inserted by Word or at Createspace).  We didn’t get the opportunity to preview the Kindle version after I uploaded it, so we’ll be seeing the final result when the readers do.  That’s always scary–but I think everything will be fine…and if it isn’t we can make changes and send the people who bought it an updated/corrected version for free, so that’s good. But I really don’t anticipate any problems there…

I am waiting for Createspace to fix the book description for the Kindle version.  I changed a boo boo almost immediately after it went live but it seems to not have “taken”, so I sent them a message asking them to intervene and make the change at their end (KDP) since Amazon has elected to advertise that version far and wide.  So far the change hasn’t happened, but this it a long holiday weekend, so I hope it will happen tomorrow. If not, I’ll call them and see if I can light a fire under them.

Guess that’s all for this time.  I hope you’re enjoying this holiday season and looking forward to 2016 with eager anticipation. I sure am!