salt bagels and surf and simmering sun....

Reportedly, one last day of over-90's heat, and then we're back to reasonable seasonable. I plan on spending all of next week in various stages of Outdoors, to celebrate.

[hopefully, everyone has come through their heat, excessive rain, or quench-already-you-damn-fire, and can relax a little now, too.  Why can't we send the rain to the fire, anyway?  Science, get on that, stat.]

Meanwhile, revision work on Heart of Briar continues. It feels like a good book, if somewhat different than I've been doing. Fixing things that were broken, making sure to lay down the proper details for book 2, making notes for book 2.... I really wish I'd time to write both books of the duology and then do the revisions, but my publisher wants to release them both in late 2013, so that's not going to happen.

Once this revision is in the can, it's back to "Miles to Go," and all sorts of digital production work, and some editing, and.....

oh yeah. There's this book coming out in a few weeks, isn't there?  *nervous glee*

and that's a wrap...

The past month, I've been slogging away on the revisions to HEART OF BRIAR, thinking and rethinking every detail of this new world and new characters and rather tricky new magic set-up.  And just when I thought I was done, I realized that the entire ending of this book changed in revisions. I mean, the ENTIRE ending, nearly 1/5 of the book.

Argh.

The mountain of pebbles was making ominous avalanche noises, but I kept it steady. I think.

In fact, I know that the book is better, stronger, and more interesting, now.  It was just...frustrating, to see the things that I'd thought were excellent ideas/threads turn out to be not-so-good. But this is why we read, and revise, and revise again, and then re-read to make sure all your brilliant saves really ARE brilliant....

But... other than that last read-through, I can say that HEART OF BRIAR is DONE*.  And pretty damn good, I think.

Now, where's the wine?




*for levels of done that don't include the line edit, the copy-edits, or the first pass proofs, anyway.