How I’m Doing on The Quest for Home — 1

Over the past 25 years, I drafted five books but never published. When my kids moved to adulthood and my job moved home, I had time to finish them. This one–The Quest for Home–is the final of those five:

A treacherous journey across two continents, a ruthless traitor, and unexpected salvation.

Based on a true story, this is an unforgettable saga of hardship and determination, conflict and passion. This is a Hero’s Journey as early man spreads across Eurasia, and survival — or extinction — is the prize. My hero–as befits a thriller–is bigger-than-life and regularly does the impossible. Which is good because nothing less than the future of mankind is at stake.

With a planned publication of Fall 2019, here’s how I’m doing.

• I finished the final rough draft (not even close to the final draft) and am now wordsmithing, which should take a few months. Wordsmithing is where I look at words and phrases and decide if they’re the best to communicate what I want to say. It’s like looking at a landscape through a straw, seeing only a tiny bit of the entire picture. For me, it is a massively effective approach to editing my stories. I often come out of this phase thinking I may actually have written something wonderful. I use a lot of word lists for this ( that, this, was, still, so, began–words like these) and found great ones over at Ronel’s writer’s blog, Ronel the Mythmaker, and Kate Johnston’s writing blog.
• I’m putting together preliminary marketing materials–just enough to get things started. I’m a few months away from ordering the cover.
• I’m also thinking about changes I’ll need for this book, as the second in a series. Deborah Jay has a wonderful list of 10 things to pay attention to.
• Unlike one-and-done novels (books not part of a trilogy), I don’t have to tie up all the loose ends in this book. I have Book 3 for that. As I write, I’m taking note of those dangling unfinished pieces so I can wrap them up in the final book, In the Footsteps of Giants.
• I set up Book 1 in the Crossroads trilogy, Survival of the Fittest, for print book sales as well as Book 1 in the Dawn of Humanity trilogy, Born in a Treacherous Time. Using Amazon’s print-on-demand service was easier than I expected, though tedious. Anyone have feedback on this?

Question: I’ve seen many digital books start paragraphs with only 3 spaces rather than 5. Any thoughts on this?

Another question: Which tagline do you like better:

Five tribes. A dream. An unexpected friend and a deadly traitor.

A treacherous journey across two continents, a ruthless traitor, and salvation from someone unexpected.

I appreciate your help!

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Jacqui Murray is the author of the popular Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy, the Rowe-Delamagente thrillers, and the Man vs. Nature saga. She is also the author/editor of over a hundred books on integrating tech into education, adjunct professor of technology in education, blog webmaster, an Amazon Vine Voice,  a columnist for TeachHUB and NEA Today, and a freelance journalist on tech ed topics. Look for her next prehistoric fiction, The Quest for Home, Fall 2019. You can find her tech ed books at her publisher’s website, Structured Learning