Jerry and Rich are back!
Jerry kicks off a new month with a quick series status: drafts for Books 2–9 are in the can, novellas are mapped, and he’s deep in revisions on Book 1.5 while restarting edits on Book 2. He talks trimming chapters, reading aloud, and tightening prose with the Emotion Thesaurus, Grammarly, and ProWritingAid—plus why he temporarily paused 1.5 to hit a firm editor deadline on Book 2. Off the page: an 86 on the course (with back-to-back birdies!), a white-chicken-chili showdown at work, and the eternal tug-of-war between football, golf, and word counts.
Rich checks in after travel, then sets his sights on Novel November to lock in his yearly word goal—plotting ahead for a fresh mystery while he experiments with a cross-platform Scrivener-style tool (WaveMaker) he can sync through Google Drive. Together they dig into making books more discoverable as AI becomes the front door for recommendations: metadata that actually matters, why showing up in Google Books helps, and how to phrase reader-style prompts that surface the right titles—without spoiling any plots.
If you’re juggling edits, tools, and timelines (and maybe a chili cook-off), this one’s for you.
Keywords: writing podcast, editing a mystery series, amateur sleuth, novella 1.5, Book 2 edits, Grammarly vs ProWritingAid, Emotion Thesaurus, WaveMaker writing app, Novel November (NaNoWriMo-style), AI book discovery, Google Books indexing, author metadata, indie publishing, productivity, golf, office chili cook-off
