I’m Kristen Tate—editor, writer, and proprietor of the Blue Garret. I’m currently chronicling the process of revising and self-publishing my next book in these subscriber-only newsletters. You can unsubscribe at any time using the link at the bottom of this email. Thanks for joining me at the garret!

It’s week thirty-six of 2024. How is the writing going these days? It’s a three-day weekend here in the US and fall is in sight just over the horizon. Maybe what you need this week is some guilt-free rest (all rest should be guilt free, in my opinion). Maybe what you need is a stretch of hours that belong just to your creativity and writing. Maybe you need a dreamy half-hour spent imagining the new project that will occupy your writing hours in the coming months. Whatever you need and want today, I hope you get it.

I was working on the acknowledgments section for Novel Study last weekend and reflected on what pulled me out of my pandemic malaise and gave me the creative energy to start the blog series that turned into the book. From this distance, I can see now that a series of online classes I took in 2020 and 2021 provided me the community connection and intellectual stimulation (and encouragement to rest!) I needed to start writing again. If that sounds like something you need, I have two colleagues rolling out programs this fall: Katey Schultz is offering a monthly Book Club & Craft Seminar for Writers featuring a number of stellar authors. And Genevieve Clovis is offering a prompt writing group that looks like a great way to get yourself out of a creative rut. Both Katey and Genevieve are smart, warm teachers who radiate encouragement.

Here at the garret, I’m immersed in copyediting a clever thriller set in Victorian London, giving me the excuse to go down all kinds of historical rabbit holes to sleuth out whether this or that term would have been correct for the period. (The Oxford English Dictionary, which I access for free via my local public library, is my tool of choice here, but Etymonline.com, Green’s Dictionary of Slang, and Google Ngram, which you can set to search UK-only books within a specific range, are also useful.)

And I’m closing in on the final weeks of work for Novel Study! Let’s look at my stats:

August 31 snapshot

⏱️ 192 hours to date

☑️ 164 to-do list items

✅ 103 to-do items completed

📑 Draft #6: 266/266 pages

Previous installments: Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5, Week 7, Week 8, Week 10, Week 12, Week 14, Week 22, Week 26, Week 28, Week 30, Week 32

After taking two weeks off for vacation, I came back home and plunged straight into editing work, but all of last weekend was devoted to a last polishing pass of Draft #6, which I was able to finish on Monday. My to-do list ballooned to 163 items when I added my own copyediting checklist to the card, but I worked my way steadily through all of those tasks—the big things like polishing clunky sentences, and the little (and very, very tedious) things like checking every single quotation in the book against the original.

Now, I’m deep into the production checklist, checking off big and little tasks whenever I have a window of time at the end of my editing day. I’m doing my own book design and formatting using Vellum, which is thoughtfully designed, easy to use, and built specifically to generate both ebooks and print books from a single file. Vellum isn’t as powerful or flexible as Adobe’s InDesign, which is the tool used by professional book designers, but it allows a non-designer like me full control to create an end product that is attractive and looks professional.

Yes, there are a few “orphans” at the bottom of pages in the print edition that I would love to fix, but I’ll trade that for the ability to endlessly tweak the design to my heart’s content. This is exactly why self-publishing is a good route for those of us who like maximum control. I love being able to look at the print design and decide to zap a few words from a long chapter title just to improve the look of the table of contents or waffle back and forth about whether to use footnotes or endnotes.

This weekend I’ll be working on final touches to the illustrations and starting on a read-aloud proofing round from the PDF file. But I’m going to be taking some rest too, especially after my hard slog through the whole book last weekend. In addition to being Labor Day weekend, it’s also a double birthday weekend for my daughter and I. That means a long, lazy day of baking (homemade angel food cake!) and cooking (a bolognese that simmers for hours and hours) for her birthday dinner, and then a very fancy and even lazier restaurant brunch for my birthday meal the next day.

I’ll be back in two weeks, maybe ready to announce a launch date for the book!

Our Thing of Joy is a restored and colorized video of a bluegrass performance from 1928 that I’ve watched several times through now. I watch a lot of black-and-white movies and have never felt like they were lacking anything (my kids disagree!), but something about this short bit of footage being colorized made the performers feel closer to our own time. (And I was excited to have one of my questions answered by the comments section—a relative of one of the performers reports that their great-uncle always wore leather gaiters to protect him from snakebites!)

Stay well, y’all, and keep fighting the good fights.

Kristen

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