halfway to the finish line

With all the manuscript work and proofing done (you will not believe all the small edits and corrections - in fact, I'm tired of looking at my own stories, haha), and all the cover artwork completed (you'll see the answer to "to cartouche or not to cartouche"), along with a photo by Benjie Ordonez, the most time-consuming part of the process is done.

Getting blurbs is the next step for "The Kite of Stars and Other Stories". Anvil sent copies of the collection to other authors (some I know, some I don't know) and I dealt with my pinoy sense of "nakakahiya naman" and asked two international spec fic writers I admired- and they said yes. What these blurbs will actually say is something I wait for with bated breath.

This reminds me of a joke the LitCritters have about the odd blurbs that you read on certain books, you know, the one with ellipses in the quotation. So something that reads:

"...an amazing book...cannot...put it down!"
-Gaudencio Rivera

Which sounds positive, could actually be derived from:

"What possessed the author to think that this is an amazing book is beyond me. I cannot say how much I reviled it. If you somehow have been cursed to have it in your hands, find a way to put it down!"
-Gaudencio Rivera

Sana naman hindi ganoon, haha.

After the blurbs come in, the final layout for the cover will be completed, along with the ISBN, barcode and other little things. By then, the lay out of the actual pages should be done.

We're looking at a late August release, in time for the Book Fair.

Fingers crossed, of course.