I forgot to show you a picture of the new, fully realized, paperback version of King of Rogaland. So here it is. That’s a pretty good cover, I think.

I also think I told you I’m working on an Amazon edition of The Year of the Warrior in paperback. At the risk of sounding self-satisfied, I’m actually kind of impressed with it. It’s a good story – grabs the reader and keeps the action going. I’m not sure I’ve improved a whole lot as a writer in the 25-plus years since the thing was published.

I was taken aback to discover that the final draft I’m working with – as well as the privately printed version I’ve been handselling for a few years – features “dumb quotes” rather than “smart quotes.” You probably know what that means – smart quotes are the curly ones, curving forward and backward, that you find in printed material, which MS Word usually creates for you automatically. Dumb quotes are what you see in this post. Somehow (I think it must have been during the text’s brief sojourn as a Google Doc) it lost its smarts. And I’m embarrassed to offer the book to the Amazon public in such a state. It would be a blow to my aforementioned self-satisfaction.

So I did a web search and found a method for converting them back. To my astonishment, it worked. Now I’m trying to figure out how to do the one-slash quotation marks and apostrophes.

I’ll probably mess it up. I need to save backup draft.

I’m hoping I can handle the stress.