I’m down to putting the finishing touches on the X-Ray for Peril. It’s usually the final step before the Kindle version goes live; the paperback and hardcover editions are already put to bed, slumbering until the date they awake and begin to ship. In some ways, it’s my favorite step — one last chance to add a little more polish to the finished manuscript, one last way to create a bit more magic for something that would normally be considered (as my UK colleague often says) done and dusted.

One last way to connect to something that’s been a number of months in the making.

I often wonder how many people use the X-Ray feature, though. Honestly, I didn’t know it existed until I became an author; sure, I regularly looked up a word or two in the embedded dictionary that I assumed all e-readers came with, but this notion that the writer might leave behind some additional Easter eggs — well, that’s just a pretty cool feature, if you ask me. For those of you who have taken the time to check out the history I plugged in for Vasily or were a tiny bit curious where, exactly, the University of Eastern Maine might be, kudos for taking the time to peruse my bonus content. 🙂

Of course, now that I do know about the function, I’ve been rather obsessive about checking out what other authors have done with it; the results are about as varied as the authors I have in my library, to be sure, but I’ve yet to be disappointed in what I’ve come across.

So one the X-Ray is done, it’s off to Downhill… if I can pull myself away from finishing Canceled