Notable Readers
Matt Kaye
Brian Guthrie
Amanda Orneck
Tabi Card
Scott Early
Lena (Helena and Malena)
Alisa King
Caroline Reber
Julie Barton
Briannemccarthy
Heather Warnken
Michael Brown
Sabata c lund
Jamie C Walker
Russell E.Greaver
Marlon A Joseph
Juan P Svenningsen
Dawnleu
Arleta Brehm
Gardner McPherson
Readers, this is it!!! Last chance to update your mailing address before your copy ends up at your old address. Please login and confirm ASAP. Thank you for your patience, and we can’t wait to hear your feedback on our story!
Dear Readers:
We know we have said it before, but we really are in the home stretch. Our best current guess is that A Friend for Otter will ship by late summer or early autumn. Although we have badly misjudged this timeline before, those earlier stages blindsided us with the pandemic and then the demands on our time and effort of copyediting after we (incorrectly) thought that the process was now primarily in Inkshares’ hands. Copyediting is over, and the process really is, this time, out of our hands. So although we can’t promise, we are crossing our fingers that you’ll be reading your own copies of A Friend for Otter well in advance of the holidays. We are incredibly grateful to you all for your patience and loyalty.
The stage after copyediting was when the typesetter poured the manuscript. We’ve reviewed it and provided very minor feedback. Inkshares will now finalize the manuscript and proofread it. Proofreading should begin in the next few weeks, at which point Inkshares expects to provide us with a firm release date.
In anticipation of the release date, please double check your mailing address with Inkshares, especially if you have moved since ordering your copy of A Friend for Otter (which was several years ago now for the vast majority of you).
Again, we can’t thank you enough for standing by us through the years of this project. It meant so much to us to have your support through not only time, but also through the hardship COVID brought. And we hope that as we near the last stages of publishing, your wait will soon be over and (we hope you’ll agree) well worth it!.
Your devoted authors,
Jesse and Ván (Sylvia) Medlong
Dear Readers:
We hope you are all staying safe and well in these unusual times.
It has been five long years since the beginning of our little passion project. Along the way, we’ve had many delays, and we’ve been grateful for the patience of our reader community, which stuck with us at every step. As you know from our last update, the manuscript is, in fact, complete now, and our publishers at Inkshares are working on getting signed copies of A Friend for Otter into your hands.
Having been responsible for so much delay, we wish we could say that there would be no more. Alas, it isn’t meant to be so.
While Inkshares has the manuscript, a combination of COVID-19 and more commonplace logistics have created a backlog. We thought this would mean A Friend for Otter would not go to press until December 2020 or January 2021. Today we learned from Inkshares that this timing will have to be pushed further, and we now expect the book to be printed in the summer of 2021, probably around the end of June or July.
Just as we were doing our best to get our story finished over the last five years, we know Inkshares is doing its best to bring the finished story down the final stretch. We remain happy and grateful to all of you for your support, and to Inkshares for working under difficult circumstances to bring our dream to life. So thank you all for sticking with us—your wait (and ours) is nearly over.
In the meantime stay safe, enjoy your holiday season, and we will look forward to being in touch with good news come summer.
Your devoted authors,
Jesse and Ván (Sylvia) Medlong
Dear Readers:
Thanks to you and your support for our project over these past years, we are now so close to sharing A Friend for Otter with you that we can almost taste it! (Stories taste better than you might expect, actually.)
We have very recently completed a painstaking line-by-line edit of the entire manuscript, and although we want to be modest, we love it! Now we have sent the manuscript out to a diverse group of advance readers to get their feedback on every aspect of the story, from the occasional typo (although we hope we’ve gotten them all) to the insight and perspective that can be had only from people who have not spent years steeped in these characters and their stories. Now we must eagerly await that feedback, which is the final step before publication. We are very grateful to our advance readers, and we hope their input will help us further refine Otter’s story before we deliver it to you.
Otter is not the only kid in our lives, and a lot has happened in the Medlong-McCarthy family in the years since we began telling this story. All of us are a little older (although we can’t claim to be any wiser), Jesse is still trying to figure out how to make time for projects like this while working and helping to homeschool five kids, and Sylvia now answers to Ván (their middle name). In other words, life has gone on without regard to our progress on this project. And we expect it to keep going on afterward, even as we close this chapter on our work with Otter.
This process has taken us about five years, which is a lot longer than we expected. But you have stood by us and supported us at every step of the way. So once again, from the bottom of our hearts and inkwells, thank you for all of your patience, encouragement, and support as we have worked to make sure Otter’s story is the best we could craft.
Happy reading!
Jesse and Ván (Sylvia) Medlong
Dear readers,
We are in the home stretch now! Check out the latest iteration of our cover art, courtesy of our talented illustrator, Senetra Busbee, on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/afriendforotter/photos/a.2192518047462491/2192517187462577/?type=3&theater.
Thanks as always for your patience and support! We are both really looking forward to bringing you the best story we can. Watch this space for more updates very soon!
Jesse & Sylvia
"THE END."
These may be the most amazing pair of words we have ever typed.
After years of plugging away, we are beyond pleased to inform you that we have completed the final chapter of our novel, A Friend for Otter. We will now begin a thorough editing process, which will include sharing the completed draft manuscript with a group of advance readers for diverse feedback. Once we incorporate all the editorial changes, we will begin the publishing process, and we hope to have your copies out in time for Christmas.
Thank you to everyone for your support and patience. This has been an amazing journey, but for Otter and for us. We could not have done it without your backing and encouragement.
Sincerely,
Sylvia and Jesse