To all of you that have purchased Coyote in recent months, thank you!

I’ve received some great feedback from readers. It’s so much fun to read a review on Amazon or to get an email from somebody with feedback about the book.

Some of that feedback helpfully pointed out a number of typos that had slipped past both myself and my “dedicated team of editors.” The silly things are just so good at hiding! So, an update to the book has been posted to Amazon to rid us of those pests. If you buy the book in the future, you’ll get the updated version. If you’ve already bought it, here’s how to get the update:

1. Go to Amazon and log in.
2. In the Your Account menu toward the top-right of the page, pull down to “Manage Your Content and Devices” and click on it.
3. You’ll be presented with a list of all the Kindle books you’ve purchased.
4. Scroll down and find Coyote. There will be a little “Update Available” button next to it.
5. Click that button, confirm it in the pop-up, and a corrected version of the book will be loaded onto your Kindle.
6. Go tell everybody you know that they must buy, read, and review Coyote now.

That’s it! Pretty simple.

Keep the feedback coming. I’m sure there are other typos and errors hiding in there. Let me know what you find!

(And a friendly reminder: Go post your review of Coyote on Amazon!)

Coyote is live on Amazon.com! Yes, I finally pressed the publish button.

Like many things in life, the whole process was much more straight-forward than I expected. My thanks to Amazon for designing a simple and user-friendly self-publishing platform.

Now… everybody go buy the book!

I’m so close to pressing the Publish button on COYOTE. I may even get there today.

I’m at the “endless fiddling” stage now. Fix a grammar mistake here, change the structure of a sentence there. And good grief, how did I fail to capitalize that character’s name sixteen times?!

COYOTE is back from the editors, and neither of them have convinced me not to go ahead with this project, so now final corrections are being made and it’s almost time to release this book into the wild!

(I must say, the book is simply much more attractive in digital form…)

One of the occasional difficulties encountered in writing stories is that the characters will do things that make life harder on the writer. As the writer I’m supposed to be in charge, right? But if this difficult thing the character does actually makes the story better, well, who am I to stop that?

So a character in the book Coyote decided to give readers a bit of a peek into her origins by speaking the occasional phrase in Czech. She had been raised in the United States of America since about the age of seven, but was born in the Czech Republic. So Czech was her first language, and it occasionally still slips out. (Yes, this is a real thing. It’s called “code-switching” and is totally fascinating. See example #1 here: Five Reasons People Code Switch)

Then the character kept doing it, and it became one of the many interesting layers that I think add up to a god story. So I had to let her keep on speaking Czech once in a while. My problem with this? It’s not what you think. I wasn’t particularly worried that the reader wouldn’t understand what she was saying. I actually though that made for a kind of twisted fun. My issue had a much more selfish flavor: I don’t speak Czech.

So here’s this character I’m writing about, she turns to say something in her native language to another character, and I type… skwownns sns. Gobbledygook. Later on, my gobbledygook got replaced by the helpful offerings of Google Translate. But I know there will be the occasional reader out there who does speak Czech, or whose grandma speaks Czech, or who is just better at using Google Translate than I. And that person is going ot be let down.

Enter my first foray into the world of professional translation. Surprisingly (or perhaps not, what with the interconnectedness of everything these days) there are lots of fast, affordable places to get a set of phrases translated from English to Czech. Who knew? (You did? Huh. Well I didn’t.) So I typed all the things my character wanted to say into a table, and sent that table off to some company I’d never heard of, hoping that some nicely translated Czech phrases would come back to me sometime.

And it worked! Amazing what you can get done with a little trust, a little hope, and a little internet. So a mere $50 later my character is speaking real Czech, which I still don’t understand, but which I at least feel so much better about. Yeah, I don’t understand it, and neither will most of my readers, but it’s good to know that all those things in my story that I don’t understand are at least correct.