Life on Colony Island

Life on Colony IslandMost of you will be thrilled . . . OK, many of you will be excited . . . Alright, a few of you may be delighted to learn that the first words of the third book in the Tales From Colony Island series have been transcribed into bits and bytes. The words are precious few at the moment, but I’m damned proud of every one of them. The book, Life on Colony Island, will consist of three or four interwoven short stories. As I’ve mentioned before, Penelope and Peter will make an occasional appearance, but will not be main characters. (It’s in their contract. I have to give those two some time off in the third book.)

A New Character

This is the first I’ll be incorporating another author’s character into one of my stories. Other than the name and a few background bits, this is going to be Character 2.0 or the character from an alternate universe. In Urban Mermaid and Syrena, I’ve included a number of salutes to some of my favourite mer-authors. One of those authors even has a walk-on in Syrena. I won’t say just who that author is but I can reveal that she is Australian.

Getting back to Life on Colony Island, the character is Hailey from Pete Tarsi’s Flipping the Scales series. Other than her name and one or two brief references to her life in in that other universe, she’ll be a stand-alone character. Hailey is my favourite character from Pete Tarsi’s books and this is my (flawed) way of saying ‘Thank you’.

New Writing Software

Finally, I will be using Papyrus Author to cobble Book # 3. Urban Mermaid was written using plain old Microsoft Word. I was looking for something better and gave Scrivener a try. It was not bad, but I had two complaints about it.

The first was interfacing with Pro Writing Aid. The two products don’t really know about each other, so I have to export to a MS Word document an then run the tools In Pro Writing Aid against the document. Once I’ve made the corrections suggested by Pro Writing Aid, I must then import that document back into Scrivener if I am to do anything with it there. I did that cycle a few times and hosed a bunch of chapters. Thank Poseidon for back-ups.

The other complaint is that Scrivener has been promising a big update for years. The years have come, and the years have gone but no big update. Maybe that update wasn’t really coming but just breathing hard.

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