The WiP Slowdown, and other delays

Word count: 37250

That word count means that I've written less than three thousand words since last week. Pretty sad, especially considering the excellent progress I'd been making up to that point.

What went wrong was that the weekend before last I did something to my back. Don't ask me what I did or how I did it, because I have no idea. All I know is I woke up one morning with a serious pain around my left shoulder blade. It was bad enough that it stopped me going in to work, but as is normal with muscle pains it began to fade after a little while.

The big problem was that it didn't go away as quickly as these things usually do - I was still feeling it the following Friday. And then on Saturday morning it came back, as bad as ever. And I can tell you, trying to concentrate is hard when you have serious pain bouncing around your ribs every time you move your arm.

As a result, some code I wrote for work turned out to be truly awful and would never have worked; I looked at it yesterday and wondered What Was I Thinking?, and when it came to working on the WiP I found myself staring at the screen much of the time, with no idea which keys to bash (even with my storyboard to work from).

So today my plan is to get this post done then force myself to WRITE GODDAMMIT even if it's only for ten or fifteen minutes, since that's probably all I'll have left of my lunch break. I hope to report a word count of at least 44,000 by this time next week, and in fact quite a lot more than that.

In other news, I'm getting pretty frustrated by what's happening - or rather, what isn't - with Pavonis. The book has been available on Smashwords, Barnes & Noble and Diesel e-books for three or four weeks, which is good; it's also been shipped to Kobo and Sony, but it's still not showing in either catalog, which is not so good.

What's really a problem is that it still hasn't shipped to Apple, Amazon and others - which means it's not easily available for readers with iPads and Kindles, for example. In fact it hasn't shipped yet to more than half the places it should have gone to, and I have no idea why. I've contacted Smashwords to see if they can clue me in on what the problem might be but there's no response yet (it takes them a few days, so I don't expect an answer right away). As soon as I know more about what the hell is going on, I'll update this post and send a tweet, so please check back at intervals for news.

Update - Pavonis publishing status

I had an update from Smashwords; not much has actually changed yet but I've been told that (1) Pavonis should be available from Kobo very soon now; (2) Apple has been requested to expedite publishing, so hopefully it should appear there soon too; (3) the Kindle edition should be available very soon (tomorrow, if all goes well). I'll update the earlier post with the links as they become available.

Another Update:

Pavonis is now available on Kindle. At last. Click HERE for details.