Zanski: Blog

I intend to post the two-book Coldwater County Series, contemporary murder mysteries set in the Pacific Northwest. They revolve around the friendship between two men, the sheriff and the clinical social worker who runs the county's mental health services.

The books are written in a first person narrator, which is a change-up from the Arenoso Trails Series, which has a third person-observer narrator, except for the DeWitt entries in Game Trail, which are first person.

Both books are finished and I am presntly about half way through the first book, Coldwater Junction, giving it the once-over before posting. It'll likely be a couple-three days before I'll pretend it's proofed.

At Lazeeze's (and many others') recommendation, I have begun converting my odt files to HTML prior to submitting them. The three basic special formats -- italics, bold, and block indents -- all hold up in the transfer.

The other thing that transfers are my typos and edit slip-ups. Why they are so easy to spot after I post a story and not while I'm proofing it is just one of those mysteries of life, like what happens to make socks disappear in the laundry. So, yeah, I'm talking about Hard Trail. Ulh. Amateur Night.

About the edit goofs in Game Trail Chapter 11:
SPOILER ALERT (Deep background) As originally written, I had the K&ASR Board providing financial support to the junior colleges. But now, as I was prepping it for posting, I realized that just wasn't credible within the context of a looming financial crisis. At the same time, I decided the original austerity plan to start laying off employees in 1892, when business was still booming, was a really dumb idea, for the reasons cited in the story. The earlier version had adopted that plan.

To resolve the college funding, I had the other members of the executive committee -- Arnie, Pete, Dixie, and Raul -- pony up the money for operational costs to match Malik. Malik had originally pledged the half million for start-up capital axpenses and $50k a year for 3 years operting expenses, but the rest of it was all new.

Then, to damp the cognitive dissonance over Raul's early lay-off plan, I had Malik come up with an alternate plan to avoid immediate layoffs.

But I neglected to delete the old stuff so both old stuff and new stuff was mixed together, and some readers found that confusing. Go figure.

I think it's all fixed now, but frankly, I was balancing two books in my head at once, so there's no tellin' if everything is copacetic or not. I'll wait and see.

I have just submitted the fifth and final book of the Arenoso Trails Series, Hard Trail. The reaon it's the last book is because the time of the story has become too modern for my tastes in terms of writing a western. Once the internal combustion engine looms on the horizon, the western setting becomes anachronistic, IMHO. So I will bow out before that calamity takes hold.

True Confession time: I've left a major editing error in Game Trail Chapter 11, leaving a section I had rewritten. My apologies. Cleaning it up is my very next task.

Due to overwhelming demand (I've had as many as three requests this month alone), I offer the following link to a series of maps that are a product of my own hand and Microsoft Paint. You'll quickly discover that I am neither cartographer, topographer, nor artist. They are what they are:

https://arenosotrailseriesmaps.blogspot.com/2023/03/hard-trail-map-arenoso-trails-series.html

I made them as large as I was able, but you'll likely need the Windows Magnifier or similar app to see any detail on the Dry Valleys region maps. I'm not sure if the feature will work in every browser, but Chrome has a click-to-enlarge provision for the Blogger graphics. And I clipped through Border Wells at the bottom of some of the maps -- oops. If you have trouble juxtaposing my Arenoso State Map onto a U.S. map, that's only because it's not possible.

Despite the fact that Game Trail has been active for over a day, I had to spot my use of "more closer" in Chapter 1 all on my own. How mortifying. The inept grammer was leftover from a poorly-proofed text revision. Eventually, I'll post a repair.

Lazeeze has fixed the loss of bold font in the file transfer, and my experimental Date in bold font opening to the (date in standard font) closing appears much more obvious, at least to my eyes.

The intent of that Bold Head and (standard foot) approach was to quickly and easily orient the reader to the time transition from one section to the next.

I used the same approach to open and close the first person narration of the Wayne DeWitt character. Insering that "first peson" narrator within the overall "third person-observeer" narrator of the series was another experiment.

I've since written another two-book series, the Coldwater County Series, contemporary murder mysteries in the Pacific Northwest, using the first-person narrator. I'll post it after I finish posting the fifth and final book of the Arenoso Trails Series, Hard Trail.