Zanski: Blog

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.

I just submitted Game Trail to the posting queue.

Frankly, prepping it was a lot more work than I anticipated. First, it was longer than I remembered (Duh!), then I tripped over a major time misalignment, and finally revamped what I decided was an untenable plot development (What was I thinking?). And a few other things.

A few comments:
Apologies to Texas, especially the Rangers. (Don't want to get on Chuck's bad side.)
Polish expletives I've left untranslated; Google Translate provides some bland interpretations. Interestingly, the word "cholera" was a curse in several north and eastern European languages. Never realized that's what Dad was saying when I was a kid.

In going through the formatting of Game Trail prior to posting, I've run up against a plot detail that, when I read it this time I thought, 'That would never work.' It's a detail that recurs, now and then, through the remainder of the book, as well as in the final book, Hard Trail, so this may take a few days.

It's been a couple years since I've re-read Game Trail, so I'm not exactly sure how much will need revising, but I am sort of amazed I thought the idea would work in the first place. Go figure.

Game Trail is on deck.

I am still figuring out the special formatting applications and have hopefully discovered that the solution has been right in front of my nose all along, right in the stansard formatting and style selections in LibreOffice Writer. Go figure.

I'll apply those formats while I go through Game Trail as I prep it for posting. I'll probably wait until I post the final book, Hard Trail, before cleaning up the first three. The formatting I'm talking about is text blocks and italics. They're not essential, just really helpful. Sorry for my rookie errors.

I just submitted the Feint Trail file to the queue. This is the longest book in the series.

Technical stuff: The file is.odt written in LibreOffice Writer. I have continued to experiment with ways to show block text (e.g., for quoting a character's entire written message) within the confines of what actually transfers. This time I added an extra marked line break before and after, as well as decreasing the text line spacing. I doubt the reduced line spacing will transfer and I'm worried the line breaks will cause the text to center. We'll see.

The title: The choice of the word Feint was deliberate as both feint and it's homonym, faint, have applications to the plot. I figured it would either intrigue folks or they'd simply think I didn't know how to spell. Besides, the titles of the Arenoso Trails Series progress in alphabetical order and I needed something that was a familiar modifier of Trail and also fell between False and Game, and faint didn't. So I changed the title to Feint and re-wrote the book. Kidding.