I've done it. I've submitted The Children of Midian directly to a new small press publisher. Risky, I suppose, but I'm willing to give it a shot. Let's see what happens. I've done a bunch of research on Absolute Write, which is key to a lot of my decision making. They are not on P&E yet, so let's see how the ride goes. I'll let you all know as soon as I know anything.
I've spent nearly the last 24 hours researching small houses. It seems like many of the newer and successful smaller houses got picked up by or merged with others. Front Street Press joined Boyds Mills Press about five years ago after a very successful ten year run.
My about-to-be ten-year-old daughter has been reading Midian, and she's proved to be a terrific editor. I renamed one of my characters a while back, and in one of the later chapters, she spotted the old name listed once or twice. A little background makes this an interesting lesson to learn.
The leader of the children in Midian goes by the name of Mara. There's also another primary character whose name was Sarah. There are a few scenes in which these two have a lot of screen time with Elliot, and I found that the rhyming was a bit off-putting. So, I changed Sarah's name to Rebecca, wanting to keep it biblical.
I relied on the ol' global search/replace of MS Word. It worked great! Except in the two instances where I had spelled Sarah's name as "Sara". She was Rebecca everywhere except in this one section of the book where she was Sara twice.
Thus commences a "nearing bedtime" scene the other night between daddy and daughter.
"Daddy?" asked my girl. "Who is Sara?"
"Sara?" I said. "There's no ... oh, crap."
Lesson? Don't rely on global/search and replace AND when searching for names, look for ALL spelling variations.
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