With the Columbus Day holiday, I have all day to work on and off on writing-related activities.  This is also the best time to get to some of the things I struggle to get to.

So another refresh.  I start out optimistic.  One is a story that was never refreshed the last time I did this.  The other is a recent, easy one.  Quick cover update, new interior template with the newsletter link.

The first one, New Robot Smell, takes two hours!

Part of it is updating the checklist for refreshes.  This one was originally published on Smashwords and I never did Draft to Digital.  So I take time first to mark down all the Smashwords book vendors and match it against Draft to Digital.  I identify all the ones I will need to opt-out for Draft to Digital.  I don’t want to do this at all, but it’ll save more time in the future so I plod through it.

I’d avoided this story refresh for a while.  My head remembers this story differently, possibly because of a critique I got where another person reacted quite negatively to it.  New Robot Smell is a dark story.  I do a quick reread of it for typos and am surprised that it’s pretty good, despite how dark it is.

I stick with the same cover image, since it has gotten a lot of interest.  But not past the blurb, so I spend time on that and updating the very woeful keywords I put in at the time.  Annoying, I don’t catch a typo in the blurb until I hit Smashwords, then I have to go back to D2D to fix the typo.

I’m finding that I have to do one book all at once.  I can’t batch the different steps together like I’d been doing (i.e., search for a bunch of covers).  I’m finding as I look at these again that I’ve missed some by batching. Even something like publishing where it would make sense to batch two or three publishing on a site—nope.  Too easy to miss one.

After that, a break for a while, walk around outside.  Overcast and gloomy.  A little chill to the air.  I’m surprised to see people in shorts walking around.

In the afternoon, I’m on and off all day on the story.  My cycling pass through these chapters is adding more characterization details.