For years readers have been asking me for Michael O'Toole's book, the sequel to
The Marquess (e-book pictured here at
Regency Reads) Since I'm in the process of working through boxes of old files to recycle, I hunted down the dead tree manuscript of
The English Heiress, the title I sold the book under. I don't think this is the original version I sold, but it roughly matches the ancient Word documents I'd saved to disk. I have utterly no idea what version of Word (or perhaps Leading Edge) I used for saving this file, but it's pretty much a mess. Files are corrupted. Chapters are mislabeled. And worse yet, the only formatting left doesn't work on any version of Word that I possess. Which means I don't even have paragraphs!
So on this gloomy day, I'm sitting here with essentially hundreds of pages of unformatted text and a neat manuscript, trying to match one against the other. And once everything is put right--whenever that might be--I still have to go through and edit to something close to my current standards. I can't change the story, mind you. It is what it is. But I can reduce some of the endless roundaboutation that Regency historicals previously used, apparently in imitation of Heyer and Austen.
And ever after all that, I still love Michael!
2 comments:
Patricia, sooooooo appreciate all you doing to get your previous books out! I get everyone of them when they are up on Fictionwise! So I'm so looking forward to this one as well. All I ever wrote was a thesis for my masters and that was on an electric typewriter back then and I hated doing it, and knew I'd never write, but want to read it all! So can't imagine all you do to write your books but I'm spoiled getting to read it all! Thanks again, I love the cover picked!
Sigh, my own blog won't let me comment this morning.
I remember those electric typewriters well, but I loved that they transferred words from my head to paper so rapidly! Not the same as the hard work of a thesis.
Michael's book has hit a snag. Those old computers didn't always work well with the old printers and I'm missing pages from the corrupted files. It's an interesting journey...
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