#Foultner

[kvalenagle]

Continuing to make sure Tumblr gets to see all of the fun GryphIns art, here's the Valentine's Day cards so far =] Plus a slight nod to all of the Tresh+Rorin shippers out there who keep sending me fan fiction of those two. You should really post that online for other fans instead of just sending it to me. Artwork by Kittrel (who is not on Tumblr that she can remember), the graphic designer on the series who does the chapter headers and ornamented scene breaks... plus made all the chibi hearts as fans talked about their favorite characters in the series. You can find high definition versions of the cards on my author website if you want to print them out yourself to use: https://kvalenagle.com/goodies/ Who's your favorite? Are there any couples you'd like to see get a card? It was mostly demand from fans that brought the Foultner+Henders card into being this last year.

[findteenpenpals]

Lithia Foultner

Hello! My name is Lithia, I am 15 years old(almost 16) and I live in the US.

I really like reading, sewing, making random crafts that I probably don't need, and writing. I also really want to travel when I get older. I have never left the US so I would like pen pals from different countries. But I like pen pals from America too. But if you do choose me to be a pen pal, I will write you super quick, and I'm trying out some new envelop art. So you might get a fun envelop.

I'm not exactly sure what I am to put here, but I haven't got any social media, so if you want to contact me you'll have to email me lithiafoultner@gmail.com

[kvalenagle]

It's a chaotic week, and there's no better way to greet a grumpy Wednesday than with this @merteazy Blinky art <3 It's a week of doctor visits and medical tests, which always leaves me grumpy because I can't always get any editing done. Pridelord is mostly through line edits, which are going fairly fast, but I needed to take a break to add in a new Whisper scene. I'll avoid spoilers, but there was a subplot I considered taking on to Saberbeak before finishing it, and when I was doing my line edits, I realized that I had the perfect moment to pay it off right then. It just required a few nudges. Most books don't get scenes added in the line edit phase, but the large ones like Ashen Weald or Crackling Sea had the same thing come up. If you're new to book creation, everyone is a little different, but my novels usually go through the following phases. Story-related ones are slow, the rest can be as fast as a single day or two. 1. I write the book. This is actually the first and second draft. Before I start writing for the day, I read and edit what I wrote yesterday. That helps keep it fresh in my mind. I ran a test early on when it took me an hour to write a thousand words, and I found that if I had just read/edited the last thousand words I wrote, it took about 30 minutes, and the writing went twice as fast. So this turned out to be a 'free' second edit as I went along. 2. I read through it in Scrivener (the most common novelist word processor) and make changes. My goal here is to fix story issues, foreshadowing, etc. 3. I read through it out loud with my spouse. My brain will often leap from A to D, and his brain needs B and C to be there. If I'm reading it out loud, he can tell me what he needs to make sure the logic flows, and I can usually find a way of saying it that works perfectly for me, too. And reading aloud catches some errors that I wouldn't normally find. 4. I hand it off to my developmental editor, Dustin Porta, and my beta readers. These steps used to be separate, but there's a lot of redundancy here. It's also a case where sometimes Dustin has a feeling but we need data from how fans think. A lot of Foultner and Henders scenes get saved here. I'll go through his feedback (~500+ fixes, some bigger than others), and go through beta feedback. Beta reader probably deserves its own post, but the biggest problem with editing isn't finding problems... it's the author editing out the good parts. Beta readers are flagging their favorite bits first, before the mistakes, so I don't delete, say, Cherine from the novel. 5. I print it out and do a line edit myself. This fixes prose, pacing, language, imagery, and echoes. This is about making sure the language compliments the story and doesn't detract from it. 6. It goes off to Tim Marquitz, my copy editor. This is spelling/grammar/etc. He catches the grammar things that're invisible to me. 7. I do a final printed read-through with a green pen (things I want to fix but probably shouldn't so I don't introduce new errors) and red pen (things that if I saw in someone else's book, I'd consider an error, and must fix.) There's usually a proofreader in here, too. You expect to catch 95% errors from each pass. This is often when the Patreon supporters get their ebook version =] Though it gets updated with the release version if typos are found after here. 8. The audiobook narrator, James Scott Spaid, begins recording the book. He'll always catch some things that got past everyone else by virtue of saying them out loud and doing the sound engineering. Once he finishes, I listen through, suggest changes if any come up, and an audio proofreader comes in. Usually once I've listened, Patreons get the audiobook. And during this phase, the final formatting and printed proofs are happening since the page count is finalized even if a typo or two gets fixed. And that's it =] Eight big steps from start to finish. The first steps are by far the slowest because they involve story changes.