Titan's surface from 10000km, infrared, false-color image.

Yesterday, NASA released the most complete view of the largest moon in our solar system. A false-color composite taken on November 13th at high altitude. Cassini used its infrared, moderate resolution camera system. allowing it to see through the thick hydrocarbon atmosphere. The 1KM/px resolution image shows landmasses, dunes and liquid lakes of methane. Hard water ice covers much of the surface and at -176ºC, it’s like a rock.

It may be the most interesting place in our solar system.

I have started editing Book 2 of Trajectory this week. I’ve begun by fixing up the styles to conform to the Smashwords Style Guide. That’ll save me from the painful process I went through for Book 1 of having to “fix it in post”. There’s nothing quite like the gut wrenching feeling of having a document editor effect massive changes on your book with little control or insight into the process. I’ve caught (and updated) a couple of errors introduced by this process in Book 1.

Now about those updates: since I’ve made a couple of changes to the Amazon and Smashwords books since publishing, I’m curious if any of you have noticed updates being pushed to your Kindles, or emails that there’s a new version on Smashwords to download. This is another murky part of the process I have very little insight into and it would be good to know more about. Comments  appreciated. If you’ve bought the ePub on Smashwords, you may want to check back and see if there’s a new version waiting for you. I updated it earlier this week.

Wattpad‘s serving usefully as another editing pass. Seeing each chapter again when posting is a good opportunity for another scan. I figure I’ll do my three posts per week then update the books on Amazon and Smashwords with a new version incorporating any changes. It’s a little cumbersome, and a lot error prone. I crave continuous integration and single button publishing to multiple sources, but I apparently can’t have that. Smashwords wants to be that kind of service, and they are very nice people, but Amazon prevents them from publishing books under a certain threshold. I’ll write more about the tools in a later post, this is just a first taste. It is woefully more complicated than I wish it were.

Now for a bit of pleading. If you’ve read Book 1, please leave an honest review for me. I know Amazon’s picky about who they let in, and will bin reviews from friends and family, but every little bit helps. I’m curious about how they determine this. Are they scanning friends and followers on social media? That seems likely as they have all of my connections in my author profile. If you haven’t read it yet, Amazon’s put it on sale this week for the holidays so now’s a good time to buy.

Ok, enough of that. Listen to Radar Echoes on Titan.