#weekendgetaway

I'm writing this just after returning from a #weekendgetaway with my wife and another couple. We dashed off to Dallas from Austin, without kids, thanks to the help of grandparents, and celebrated our friends' anniversary by shopping, eating, reading, and getting up-to-date on world affairs. I'd love to be able to pump everybody up with my recharged energy from taking a break, but I don't feel it. Not sure why, but I suspect it is the heavy load of work I'm returning to, the grim reality of world affairs, and that daylight savings time stole an hour of sleep. Ironically, the only two pics I see on my phone are a picture of some cakes, and a pic of my wife aiming a rifle at Beretta (which I'm sure she'd shoot me if I shared). Maybe my wife or friends will send me some more sharable pics.

Am I the only one who occasionally returns from vacation with a worse attitude than when I embarked? I know, with all the bad stuff in the world, being depressed about returning from a vacation is petty. Shocker--I can be petty. But I did have a great time. I loved having some chunks of time to read instead of squirrelling away a few precious minutes while waiting to pick up a kid from dance or basketball. I loved having time to talk to my wife about topics that didn't involve scheduling who drove whom to what activity. And I had no problem tuning out work (which is new for me, and probably a reflection of just how much I wanted to turn it off).

Funny story - while editing Book 4, I did a double-take on one of the character's names, looked it up in my database (yep, I use an app called Kase on my phone to keep straight my characters, locations, creatures, spells, special items and vocabulary), and found that I'd misspelled someone's name in Book 4. Dreading what I would find, I looked back in Book 3 and found I'd misspelled it eight times, entirely in a chapter that I'd added to Book 3 after completing Book 4. So somewhere between those books, I'd mentally revised that character's name. It wasn't too difficult to fix, but I sure felt dumb.

I also had a friend tell me that chapter 11 of Book 3 was unreadable on Kindle in dark mode. Investigation revealed that Chapter 11 had a fixed character font and color--no idea why. The original document didn't have it, but one of the interim files generated by formatting revealed it, probably from a stray click. THAT mistake proved fairly hard to fix, but it is all taken care of now.

I shipped copies of Book 4 out to structural beta-readers. Ironically, I did that the day before I noticed the spelling mistake, so they'll have to deal with the incorrect spelling throughout. I also started pics for Book 4. The most complicated of them are still under discussion, with me trying to bargain for a lower price. I commissioned another map--Forsaken, Mort's colony. I have a story in my head that I'd like to write about Broxton the elder, but story-wise, it would fit in better down the road. In the meantime, maybe I'll throw the map into Book 3.

o To-Do list for writing last week:

~~Email updates~~
Grammatical and Style edits for Book 4 - through chapter 28.
Follow through with pic orders. I ordered two pics, and discussed a couple of others.
Mail beta reader copies. (Update with grammar and style edits that I have so far.)

o To-Do list for writing this week: