May we please have some boring now?

It’s been an interesting week, hasn’t it?

Are we all completely fed up with interesting weeks? I know I am. I’d dearly love a solid week where there’s nothing in the news but feel-good stories and kitten videos. Heck, I’d settle for one solid DAY of nothing but feel-good stories and kitten videos!

Now the weather only impacted my week indirectly. Most of my team on the Super Secret RWA project are in areas hard by the weather, which meant that for most of last week, I was the only one with power. Sort of puts the kibosh on group work, but that just meant that I focused more on words.

I’m currently building up to one of those scenes that I’ve been waiting to write for months (there are four or five of those in this book.) And, because I really needed to get those words out so that I could write the other words, I’ve already written the ending. Now I just need to get from here to there.

I also worked on edits for Ashes and Light, and I’m almost done with the page proofs for Wings of Air. I should finish that tomorrow, which means that the final formatted manuscript will be uploaded by Wednesday at the latest, and we’ll be ready to go for March. Once I finish Wings of Air, I’ll start the page proofs on The Lady and the Sword.

Page proofs are usually the last thing that a writer does before the book goes to print. You’re checking layout, making sure the book looks good, and that words didn’t get left out. By this point, the book has usually gone through two or more rounds of edits, so there’s very little to do other than say “Hey, this looks good!”

Unless, of course, you’re me. And you just reread the first three books because why not, and you realize that you made one HUGE continuity mistake right in the middle of book 4.

Umm… oops.

So that was fixed, and I cleaned up all the stray periods that showed up in the middle of the manuscript (did I spill the punctuation bucket? I think I must have, for there to be odd periods in the middle of sentences. Weird.)

Ashes and Light is almost done as well, which means that I’ll be going in and redoing quite a lot of Table of Stone. The editor who read through the series to check my continuity pointed out a lot of problems with that manuscript, and since I have that one on the table as coming out in September, I have time to fix them all. (Depending on how Heir to the Firstborn goes, I might even be able to push Table back to November. We’ll see — I’ve been saying since I set the publishing schedule for 2021 that the last two books might switch places, depending on how things fall out.)

Not much else is happening here. I’m waiting (sort of impatiently) for the state of Florida to open up vaccinations to the 1C group. I’m hoping it will be before the summer — I want to be fully vaccinated before I have to to to Nashville for RWA Nationals. Until then… I’ll just keep on writing.

Stay safe, everyone.