Proof copy, and triumphant return of husband

Firstly, my husband is back from riding from coast to coast to raise money for the British Heart Foundation!

Secondly, arriving on the same day as him was my proof copy of The Maker’s Mask. I was gladder to see him. Really. 🙂

On the whole, I’m pretty pleased with it. The good news is that it’s much easier to spot typos on the page than on the screen.

The bad news is that something – probably something to do with the conversion process from Word 6 to OpenOffice to AbiWord to Word 2010 – has lost some of the italics that were supposed to be there, so at present I’m going through the print version of the book with the Word version open on the screen in front of me, putting them back in. I thought at first it was a problem with Lulu’s PDF creator, but it turns out to have been something that happened at my end, which at least means I can fix it. So that’s what I’m working on now.

Also, I realised that I missed a trick in calling the second half of Requite The Hawkwood War, when I could have carried on in the tradition of The Maker’s Mask and written The Bakers Basque, about a group of Euskara-speaking cupcake enthusiasts; or The Flaker’s Flask, about an alchemist and his quest to find a cure for eczema; or The Taker’s Task, which actually sounds like a half-credible title for a heroic fantasy.

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