Or in this case the reading, tweaking, reading, muttering to ones self things along the lines of:
“What the hell was I thinking?”
“Where’d you come from?”
“Yep, I like that.”
“Holy MF, that cannot live there!” … once that’s over, Vaporbyte will be in better shape to meet my first two beta readers. When they come come back to me with the exact same mutterings that I made earlier, we’ll have a good laugh, I’ll sort it, and then I’ll be looking for three or four beta readers who have NEVER read me before.
So bear that in mind if you’re a crime reader (or even if you’re not) and feel like beta reading for me.
The sorts of things I’ll be asking of you are:
Do you understand the relationships between the characters ie: was everyone introduced adequately?
Does the story make sense?
Are there any plot elements you’d like explained in more detail?
Did you get a sense of place and time?
Nothing difficult at all, just things I can’t see because I’m too close, and I know my characters quite well after all these years. My initial beta readers also know my characters and writing style very very well – their job is to find any holes in the plot and whack hazard lights around them so I can get them filled in before there’s an accident.
Once all the reading, tweaking, swearing, more tweaking, and drinking is over, I’ll write a couple of blurbs and then, the book flies away to my glorious editor (you have have met her via all the other Byte Series books; Jayne Southern). That’s when the real fun starts (or arguments and whatnot), and once we’re finished having fun then it’s all the other stuff – formatting, cover design, and so forth.

Somewhere before the four new beta readers and maybe before Bex and Charlie get their hands on this book, I’ll write a synopsis and start messing with loglines and blurbs. So, I’m not quite done, hence the blog title.
After that, I’m going to talk to a friend who came up with a really fab launch idea for this book.

In other news: I’m on the Break it Down Show this week, so look out for tweeted, facebooked, and blogged links! 🙂 It’s going to be a fun time.
The image below is a link. 😉