Cleaning The Rust Off

It's been almost two months since I posted on this blog, which is pretty awful considering that I was doing weekly posts at one time and intended to keep that up. I'm going to try to get back to that schedule. No promises, though.

So, what's been keeping me away, I hear no-one ask. As my regular readers (Sid and Doris Bonkers of Ealing) will know, things were hotting up on several writing fronts. In the last post I mentioned that I was in the middle of some heavy prep work, getting ready to start editing Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia, and that I still had the first draft of Smoke & Mirrors on the back burner waiting for me to get back to it.

Much has happened since then. The Gunn & Bohemia prep work came to an end three or four weeks ago, and since then the real editing has been going on, and it's taken up just about every free moment I have. At the same time, things on the day job front got very busy, which meant that I didn't have so many of those free moments. Nevertheless Gunn & Bohemia has been coming along very nicely, thank you. Thanks to my Copy Editor, and my Editor-in-Chief, at Xchyler Publishing, the story after editing will be way, way better than it was at when I submitted it last year.

At this moment half of the book has gone through the first and heaviest round of editing and into proper copy-editing, and about half of that has gone through to line editing. There's still a lot of work to be done, but the light at the end of that particular tunnel is definitely getting brighter.

And while I'm on the subject of Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia, it's currently slated for release sometime around November. I'll update that as we get closer to the time.

As for Smoke & Mirrors, that's still on the back burner and likely to stay there a while longer. The reason for that goes back to last October, when I submitted two typescripts to Harper Voyager during their open submission period. One of those 'scripts was rejected in February, if I remember right—but Harper didn't say which one. And then this week, I got a rejection email for the other one, whichever that was.

(No, I'm not bothered by the rejections; HV received over 4,500 submissions in that two-week period last year and we all knew only a tiny fraction would be accepted by the end. Still, I'd like to know which of the two I sent in was good enough for them to hold on to for 7½ months.)

So, when all the heavy lifting on Gunn & Bohemia has been done, that's going to leave me in a place where I have two complete 'scripts (Pavonis and The Artemisia Chronicle) and one half-written first draft (Smoke & Mirrors) that are, I think, very good stories but that could benefit from a good edit and rework in line with what I've learned from my above-mentioned editors at Xchyler.

So that's what's going to happen. At this moment I'm thinking that The Artemisia Chronicle will be the first to get the treatment. After that it's a toss-up between the other two. This all means that right now my schedule is full for the better part of the next twelve months, possibly more.

(Those titles aren't fixed, by the way. Pavonis is currently available through Smashwords and others but I'll be taking that down very soon, and after rewriting it'll have a new title that's a better fit for the story. The Artemisia Chronicle will also probably have a more fitting title before I submit it for publication anywhere; and Smoke & Mirrors is a definite no-no because there are too many other works out there with that title.)

I see that it's 9:30pm and I have a 5:15am start in the morning so it's time to close this. As I said, I'll try to get back to the weekly posting schedule, day-job and writing permitting. And so, until next time...