Still Making Progress...

Whew, ok. Yes, I'm still here, up over my head in revisions on two large projects, Heir of Tanaris (the upcoming Tehovir novel) and Defenders of the Wildings, the follow-up series to Daughter of the Wildings. I'm making progress; Tanaris went out to the beta readers early in the month and the reports are coming back in, and I finished making my revision notes for Defenders (a couple hundred pages' worth) and now I'm trying to systematically set about making sense of it all and organizing the revision so I don't miss anything, from adding the actual plot to book 1 to characters whose reason for being in the books I'm still figuring out to what exactly that green stuff is.

I've also got some more short stories I want to put into a collection, and then there's the Source-Breaker stories, which will be a newsletter exclusive. Life's been kind of crazy for the last month, with one thing and another, but hopefully things will settle down. I'm hoping to be able to cut back on extra demands so I can recover from everything and get caught up on my writing projects.

Since I'm always trying to improve my writing craft, besides my usual revision methods I'm working my way through The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne, which is basically like a big textbook about story structure and story theme and how they work together, and how to analyze them in your project. I'm doing this with the revised version of Tanaris, and it's making me look at things in a different way that's both mind-blowing and makes a lot of sense with how I think about writing. I'll definitely be incorporating it into my workflow. It might even streamline my process a little by catching more of the big issues at the beginning of revisions.

With Heir of Tanaris coming into the later stages of revision, I think I'll do the cover reveal coming up before too long. Newsletter subscribers will get the first peek, so if you're anxious to see this gorgeous artwork, sign up if you haven't already! And Sivael from Source-Breaker has been waiting to be interviewed, so I'll try to get to that next. Back to work :)