DUNE 7 BLOG

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Hunters Draft 5 Delivered

630 pages, 97 chapters, 150,000 words. At least for this draft.

I completed the fifth edit on HUNTERS OF DUNE, copied it onto a flash drive and a backup ZIP disk, and mailed it off to Brian. Then I e-mailed the file to our US editor Pat LoBrutto and our UK editor Carolyn Caughey.

Next, I made the laser printer work overtime to crank out three complete hardcopies of the manuscript to give to my trio of first "test readers," Catherine (my assistant, who transcribes all of my tapes), Diane (Rebecca's sister and also her assistant), and Louis (Rebecca's father, a retired English teacher who has read all 13 DUNE books so far). They each have their own areas of expertise and always offer good suggestions. They'll be reading the draft of HUNTERS while Brian does the sixth edit over the next month, then I'll go into Draft 7 armed with their comments and ideas.

Brian is sending me Draft 4 of SANDWORMS in a week. So, in the meantime, I'll have plenty of days to rest, recharge my mental batteries, catch up on some reading, maybe do a little hiking. . .

Well, not quite.

In between the DUNE projects, I've got one week to read through and do the first rough edit on the recently written SLAN HUNTER (80,000 words, 300 pages). Also, the British publisher of "Seven Suns," Simon & Schuster UK, just sent me the 700-page typeset galleys for OF FIRE & NIGHT, which need to be proofed.

Then by next Tuesday, I'll receive Brian¹s files for SANDWORMS, and start the next edit on that.

We'll keep you in the loop on each stage of the process.

--KJA

PS -- Two recent interviews were just posted about "Seven Suns" and SLAN HUNTER. If anyone is interested, here are the links:

http://www.sfsite.com/01a/ka215.htm

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=0&id=34076