Random update

I’m back from a family funeral down in LA. I actually got back late Tuesday, but I’m only now started to catch up on rest and feel something like a functional human being again.

It was a hard trip. For a variety of reasons, this was a difficult time for a lot of my family. My sister and I got up to fly out of our home cities at 3 am and 4 am respectively and didn’t have a chance to catch our breath until somewhere around 11 pm local time. The next morning was a lot of talking, worrying, one Hulk-hangry sister (she was eventually mollified with Chipotle), and then navigating LAX to get home.

I’m home. I’m safe and tired, but recovering. I’m working on the next post in our process series. Apparently, that first post on ideas wasn’t exactly a precise indicator. The second post – which is about outlining – is turning out to be a lot longer and more complex. I’ve got the time to focus on it and finish, though, so I hope to finish the post and hand it over to Aron for review soon.

What else is going on in our writing? I just finished the manuscript for Lily Quinn #9 and gave it out to beta readers. I’m particularly chewing my nails over this one for reasons that would be extremely spoilery, so I won’t go into them here. But one reader got back to us Monday night and proclaimed it good. Whew!

That leaves just three more Lily Quinn books. Three! I always feel like I’m stuck in the middle of a project forever, and then I’m suddenly at the end. Holy carp! Ideally, that means about three more months of work for me, though it’ll more likely be closer to four. But when that’s done, then I get to go back to Dark West! Those books have been sitting on my hard drive for a year now, waiting to be done. I can’t wait to get to work!

The rest of this week, though, will be eating a lot of yogurt, taking naps and binging on the Iterate and Optimize podcast.