On A Successful Move...So Far

We made it! It was a frantic rush, especially near the end, but we've managed to get the stuff from the apartment all packed, the cars shipped, and the family flown to Pennsylvania, where we will now be working and living. Our hopes are that a change in situation will help encourage us in our efforts to both raise Sera and continue to publish. We have a new job up here that is offering a lot of opportunities we did not have in the emergency room, and I am hoping that a more consistent schedule might relieve a little of my own personal stress. But we will have to see!

In any case, as a quick update, the books are doing well. Wolfhound continues its march, and Kingsley seems to be finding its audience person by person. As I'm looking back on the move we just went through and the past couple of months, I can only be thankful for all the blessings we've enjoyed and the fact that in spite of everything, we've managed to pull it off.

Now if only we could find an apartment to rent...

On Moving Soon

In less then seven days, my entire house needs to be packed and ready to move cross country.




AHHHHHHHH!

On Revisions and New Stories

So I've started on the revision schedule that I had planned for February. The fact that I'm moving in less than two weeks has kind of complicated things, but not too badly. The plan is to do a quick readthrough of Badger, mainly to remove characters that shouldn't be in some of the scenes, refine some of the relationships, and organize the whole book a bit better. That part of the effort has gone well so far, and I am happy to say that I think I will finish that pretty soon.

Revision plan number two is to move on to Murders once Badger is done. Murders needs a pretty similar treatment, with a few more detailed revisions to iron out some of the inconsistencies. My hope is to finish that by the end of the month so that I can dive into a revision of Iron Angels after that.

As far as new stories, I've started Social Contract now in earnest. I guess a lot of my obstacles in that story had to do with what kind of a story the book was turning out to be. It's very hard to write a book that touches on societal conditions and politics without turning preachy, and the initial sections of the story seemed to be headed in that direction. After a few weeks of writer's block and a lot of pondering, I think I've got the direction of the story figured out, though, so hopefully I can dive right into the meat of things! My goal on that one is to have the first draft done by the end of March, so that I can start on Eagle, the third Jacob Hull book.

That's the plan for now, at least. I'm sure the move will require some...adaptations...but I remain confident that I can get all of this done on time. After that, it should be a pretty straight shot from here to the beginning of May, when Iron Angels will launch, and after that I just have Badger and Murders to get up in the summer and fall respectively. Meanwhile, I need to be working on the novels that will hopefully be ready to launch through 2013, namely Social Contract, Eagle, Airships Over London, and Iron Angels 2.

Sigh. When did the hours of the day get to be so few...