home stretch

This isn’t, I’m afraid, going to be much of a post. I’m in the home stretch of THE PRETENDER’S CROWN, which has just crested 175K in length (ai!), and which has, oh, somewhere between one and seven thousand words left. I’m hoping it’s around 4K, and then all I’ve got left to do is rewrite the prologue and fix all my NOTES and do a spell check and turn it in.

You would think this would be cause for great celebration. Realistically, it’s cause for an extremely heavy sigh of relief more than delight, and maybe an evening off, and then I have to go directly into doing what Luna calls “author alterations” and most other houses call “galleys” for HANDS OF FLAME, because they were due yesterday and my editor’s assistant managed to get me an extension til Friday, so, yeah, basically no rest for the wicked.

But next week I get to take the week off before starting the fourth Walker Papers novel! Where “take the week off” means “write a short story, and possibly as many as three comic book scripts”. Though if it turns out to be 3 scripts, then I probably won’t start WP #4 until June, and will take *two* weeks “off” to write those other things.

Yes, folks, this is the life of a working writer. Ah, the glamour.