Rubber Soul Galley Proofs

Today I get the galley proofs back for RUBBER SOUL. Galley proofs are plain-cover paperback copies of the book printed with the proper fonts, spacing, page size and other similar minutia. I get four books. My job is to proofread the whole thing and make notes of any typos or other mistakes that must be corrected before the book goes to print. RUBBER SOUL will be formatted for all the electronic forms of media- iBooks, eBooks, Kindle, Nook, iPad, etc. You’ll be able to download it wherever books are available. Also I intend to record the audiobook, but the more I investigate it, the more difficult it seems. My old friend Jack Heyrman who owns Clean Cuts studio in Baltimore says that he just finished recording one- the #1 New York Times Best Seller List- TELEGRAPH AVENUE by Michael Chabon, read by a famous actor. He told me to expect to finish about 20 pages a day. RUBBER SOUL is over 540 pages! It’s going to take a forever! And that’s working everyday (which I won’t be able to do) so it looks like that audiobook could take a little longer than I anticipated. I was hoping to get it out by Christmas but that’s looking more and more dubious. Maybe it will be in time for Valentine’s Day- or maybe less. On the bright side I will start the proofreading process today. That’s always fun. I usually give a few copies to my friends to scan for mistakes. Amazingly enough, after ten readings and two professional edit jobs, some mistakes still slip through.

The anthology of rock and roll fiction called ROCK ON is out and I contributed to that with a story called THEN PLAY ON- about a street musician and harmonica-playing ghost. Short stories are fun to write and you don’t have to go into great detail like you would with a novel. I’d write more of them but most of my ideas these days are much bigger and require 500 pages to tell.

Script writing is a real kick. You need to buy some professional scriptwriting software like Final Draft, but once you’re up and running it’s pretty easy. A movie is usually around two hours long. The average is one page of script equals one page of screen time. So, a two-hour movie would be a hundred and twenty pages. You can bang out five scripts in the time it would take to

Greg Kihn Band – Debut album, Greg Kihn Again and Next Of Kihn Now available from Apple iTunes.