Finally, the book is done! Well, this draft, at least. I’m not totally happy with it. I think I’m going to make another pass on the ending later this week to fine tune it. Then when I get back from the Nebula Awards conference I’ll re-read the whole thing. But I got to the end. Yay!

Today’s fun is catching up on the stuff that hasn’t been done while I’ve been focused on writing. My kitchen is something of a disaster area at the moment. I have some business/admin tasks to deal with. And then there’s the epic to-do list before my trip next week.

I also finish entirely with children’s choir tonight. It’s the “sharing program” in which the children’s choirs perform for their families. So I have to get them through one more song, and then there’s a pizza party, and then I’m done until September.

Finishing a book gives a similar feeling to the end of semester in school. There’s a moment of “done!” elation, but then you feel strange and a bit guilty when you’re not writing/studying. You’re torn between doing all those things you said you’d do when you were done and doing absolutely nothing.

I do think I’ll allow myself some patio reading time later today. That counts as work because I’m developing something that I need to get done, and it requires a little research reading.

If I get everything else on the list done by Saturday, I’m planning on a purely relaxing Sunday to rest up for a busy week.

Still not there, though I did make good progress and have the rest of the book outlined, for real this time. All the bits are tying together, and I can see patterns emerging. So yay! I think …

I’m dying to clean my house right now, but I will prevail!!!!

I may have to shut off the wi-fi, close the blinds, and put in earplugs so that I don’t do anything else until I get this book done.

I didn’t quite finish the book Friday. On this round of revisions, I wrote the big final turning point scene first so I’d know what I was aiming for. I thought all I had to do was bridge from where I was to that scene, and then do the mopping up aftermath stuff.

Then I read the scene I wrote, and it’s now all wrong. I guess I made some very different turns along the way. But this means I was farther behind than I thought. After a good day’s work and several thousand words of writing, I ended up with fewer words than I started with. I may even have to revise some of the stuff I did on Friday to really set up the new big climactic scene.

At this point in the process, having it done well is the important thing. There are no prizes for when I finish, only for having something that makes publishers excited. And after all the work I’ve put into this thing, I really need to make publishers excited.

So maybe I’ll finish it today. I have to finish this week because I’m going out of town next week, and I want it done other than for maybe one more pass before then.

If I’m very good today, I should be able to finish this draft of the book. I’ve got the rest outlined, and I only need about 4,000 words to hit my targeted manuscript word count (though I don’t know how many words are necessary to finish the story). That’s within range for what I can do in a good day, and it’s a rainy day, which usually means I can get a lot done.

I’ll want at least one more pass on this manuscript, but I’ve mostly been editing along the way so I don’t anticipate a lot of rewriting on this round, just wordsmithing and adding a few little tweaks and details.

Then I have a story I need to write that I’ve already been researching and developing, then I need to finish Enchanted, Inc. book 9, which is about halfway done, and then I’ve got Rebels 4 to research and write, and there’s the possibility of something else that might come in the middle of it all. And then there’s a book I’ve been dying to write that I don’t know quite what to do with. I’m not sure it’s even viable, I’m not sure how to market it, I don’t know if I can pull it off. But it won’t shut up and leave me alone so I have to at least try to work on it and see what happens.

This is going to be a busy summer, it seems.

So, off to finish a book!

I think I’ve resolved my issue of what to wear other than my Star Wars nightshirt and yoga pants during the Nebula Awards. I had an appointment yesterday morning, and as I was getting dressed I realized my watch had stopped (yes, I still wear a watch — it’s easier to just check my wrist than to dig my phone out of my purse). Since the mall with the good jewelry repair place was near the appointment, I figured I’d drop by there on my way home. And then while I was waiting for the battery to be replaced, I thought I’d wander. This is kind of a dying mall (though new ownership just bought it, so maybe that will change) that only has the big anchor stores, the movie theater, and a few small shops left, but most of it is empty. I’d heard they’d put in a carousel, so I headed down to see that, and it was in front of Macy’s, so I thought I might as well see what kind of dresses they had. And lo, I found a dress on the clearance rack, a really nice “little black dress” from Ralph Lauren, in my size, for a ridiculously low cost. Even better, it’s stretchy, so not only will it pack well, but it’s not that much less comfortable than the yoga pants and nightshirt.

However, when I got it home I realized why I liked it: I already own that dress in a bright blue (and that was the dress I was tentatively planning to wear). Hey, it works, so it works in other colors. But now I need to decide whether to wear the black one or the blue one for the awards. The black one automatically looks dressier, but the blue is more striking. And can I get away with wearing both dresses to the same event on different days, or will it be obvious that I’m collecting every color of this one dress?

Then again, this is an event where I can have a conversation with someone and then later they act like they’ve never met me, so I could probably wear the same dress all weekend without anyone noticing.

I’ve also noticed that the local TV anchorwomen/meteorologists all seem to own multiple colors of this dress, so I don’t seem to have shed my TV reporter clothing taste.

First, a public service announcement: Be wary of “customer service” e-mails claiming to come from AT&T, telling you that you need to verify your e-mail address because of activity on your account, and telling you to call a particular number if you think there’s an error. That’s a scam, but it’s a really good one. The e-mail looks exactly like an AT&T e-mail, and if you look at the expanded headers to see where it’s really coming from, the domain names have “att” in them (though in a different format from the real thing, like “att-mail.com”). I was almost ready to think it might be legitimate, but thought I’d google the number you were supposed to call, and I got a string of sites reporting it as a scam, including a post on the AT&T customer service forums. So, if you get an e-mail like that from AT&T, call the number on your bill or on the AT&T site to check. Don’t click on the link to verify anything, and don’t call the number in the e-mail. Apparently, these same scammers do also call and claim to be AT&T, so don’t give information to someone who calls you. Say you’ll have to get back to them, and then call the number on your bill or on their web site.

Second, for the past ten or so years, I’ve been doing posts about writing every other Wednesday and then sending them out to an e-mail list. I took a break over the holidays and never went back to it, and no one seems to have noticed, at least, not that I’ve heard. Is this something that interests people? Does anyone care about the e-mail list? I’d kind of burned out on the schedule and was running out of things to say, and I was sidetracked by other things. I’ve been occasionally writing about writing when I feel inspired, just not on any kind of formal schedule, and I haven’t been e-mailing the posts.

Meanwhile, I have nearly ten years worth of posts. About five years ago, I put the ones I had at that time into a PDF “booklet” on my web site, but I’ve been thinking about compiling them into an e-book that I could distribute like I do my other books, probably with some cost involved, depending on the length of the book (but probably no more than 2.99). Would anyone be interested in getting all these posts about writing craft and business and writing life, in one handy e-book?

But first I have to finish the book I’m working on, and I’m so very close. I just need to figure out exactly what should happen at the end, since I’ve reached the “and then stuff happens” part of my outline and it needs to get more specific than that.

Yesterday was pretty productive: I did my taxes and I finally got through that tricky scene and am ready to move forward. Progress!

Plus, I’ve already done my errands for today, so I can spend the afternoon writing. I need to finish this book because there are so many other things I want to write, and the ideas are escalating daily.

For instance, I now have some major incidents for the next Rebels book planned, and one of them seems such an obvious thing to put Verity through that I can’t believe I hadn’t already thought of it. Oh, that’s going to be fun.

Then there’s this other idea that’s been lurking in the background, and a documentary I’ve been watching on Amazon brought it back to the surface.

Meanwhile, I’ve left Katie hanging in mid-crisis for a long time and need to get back to her.

And then there’s this entirely new fictional universe I just created that I may need to play in soon.

Plus a very old story idea that refuses to go away. I have this vague idea that it might make a fun serial, but that would require finding time to write it.

So, off to work I go!

I’m on the verge of finally having all my books back up where they need to be. It may take a little time to fully propagate through all the systems and be obviously available. The one slight delay is in the hardcovers of the Rebels books, but that’s in process. I have most of the purchase links on the web site fixed, but I still have a bit of work to do on those.

Which meant I finally got to go back to writing yesterday. Since it had been a while, I went back to a part I knew needed fixing and did some rereading/revising. I caught a few continuity errors and typos, so I guess it was worthwhile. Next up is a scene I decided didn’t need to be there because I realized there was no reason for the character to do the thing he was doing, but I need to figure out what goes in its place. I need a transition. And then I should be able to move forward toward the ending. I have a good chunk of the rest of the book mapped out.

I really want to finish by the end of the month (yeah, I said that last month, but business intervened) because May is going to be rather busy. I’ll be going to the Nebula Awards conference in mid-May, and I’m doing a workshop there, so I need to write that. I also have a story I need to work on, and then there’s some other stuff.

So it’s head down and focusing on writing for the next couple of weeks.

I have just about all the books republished, though I’m still struggling with a couple of the print versions because they’re not accepting the files, even though they’re the exact same files that they already had. I’ve heard from readers alarmed that the paperbacks were suddenly super expensive, but the new “edition” (exactly the same as the old ones) should be available within a few days, aside from the two I’m wrestling with.

So I think I can get back to writing again soon. Whew! This whole thing has been very stressful, but I’ve learned a lot from doing it. Mostly, I’ve learned that I really want a publisher. I’ll finish out the series I have started, but we’ll see about what happens otherwise. If I can’t sell more books to publishers, I guess I’ll have no choice, but it’s so much easier to let someone else handle all this other stuff so I can focus on writing, which is the part I’m good at.

I’m still working on updating all the links on my web site, doing it a bit at a time as links come in.

But right now, what I really want to do is write, so I may spend a day doing that.

The slog of getting my books republished continues. Yesterday was the fun of setting up the print books. There was one that we didn’t have a ready-to-go file for because it was done in the early days when we just had CreateSpace set it up, so I had to format that one myself using a template. It wasn’t too hard once I figured it out, but it was a bit tedious. I made the mistake of working on that at night, so I had dreams and nightmares about formatting books all night long. Today I have to proof it and all the other books that I got set up. Then I should be mostly done with this transition phase and I can get back to writing.

I’m almost eager to get back to writing after dealing with all this. Maybe my mind will have solved that pesky plot problem I’ve been wrestling with. I hope it’s been working in the background while I’ve been doing busy work.

But I may not force myself to think about it until Monday because it’s a busy weekend. I’ve got a Good Friday service tonight. I’m singing with the choir and I’m also one of the readers — but being a reader means I also have to put out a couple of candles. There is some peril to doing this while wearing a choir robe, but we do have a long-handled candle snuffer.

Saturday, I’ll be baking to get ready for the choir’s Easter potluck breakfast, when we get to grab some food between services. We have to sing for three services, which means I’ll be leaving the house around 7 a.m. and getting home around 12:30. I will then promptly collapse for the rest of Sunday.

Getting back to my regular swing of things will be a relief.