Gah,

I can’t believe I’ve not updated this blog since April!! But rest assured I’ve not been idle. I’m going to try resume updating this on a regular basis , although daily is probably not going to be possible, but I will strive for once or twice a week minimum!!

The big reason that I’ve not been updating is distraction with other projects.  But those are now all pretty much behind me so for the last week or so I’ve been writing Rhune – and I’m glad to be able to devote some time to this and get it moving again.

So what was distracting me?

• The Riyria Chronicles – which are absolutely “done…done”  I don’t have hard copies in my hands but I do have .pdfs of the files that were sent to the printers. I’m going to be a guest of honor at ConnictiCon in early July so I’m hoping my books come in early and if they do, I’ll take a few copies to give away there.  So if you are in or around Hartford CT July 12 – July 14 stop on by the Convention Center.
• Hollow World I couldn’t be happier with how this project has turned out.  While the bulk of the heavy lifting is done, I have the manuscript out to two great copy editors and we are still on track for an early July release for people who backed the Kickstarter, and of course the official release will be in January.  I’m also in the final stages of signing a contract for the audio version of this book – which is quite unusual for a self-published work.
• Cover design – Yes I’ve designed covers for the three books of this series.  Now that sounds like a really stupid thing to do, especially since the chances are pretty good that this series will be traditionally published and they will disregard my covers completely…but it helped in a number of ways.  Most notably in changing the titles and  requiring updates to some words I was using in this book. I’ll save the details of this for my next post

So where am I now?  Well having been away for a very long time I had to reacquaint myself by reading what I had up to that point.  In so doing, I realized I had some problems so I had to rip out a big section of the book and rewrite.  So I spent about a week or so revising what I had written before being pulled off the project and  the story is much better for going through that process.

I’ve had about a week writing “new stuff” and now the word count is going in the positive direction again (Robin was upset to hear it going down each day as I ripped out stuff in the re-read.)  I’m now at 70,000 words and I’m now at a part of the story where several plot threads are coming together. I tend to write faster toward the end, rather than the beginning and I’m definitely seeing the light at the end of this tunnel.

More to come in the next few days.