Finished

I just finished a draft of The Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect. This is the first time I think I almost cried at finishing a novel, not because it was sad, but because I am so fucking relieved to be done. It took about 18 months, with breaks for working on Magic: the Gathering's Dominaria story and some other things, which is about 7-8 months longer than a novel usually takes me to write.

Murderbot's ability to take in information from multiple sources simultaneously make the plotting and fight scenes more difficult and less intuitive for me. And also dealing with the character's anxiety and depression and general emotional rawness is sort of simultaneously liberating and exhausting. Also, comedy is hard, folks.

It still needs all the usual revision etc, and I just sent it in to my agent and editor yesterday afternoon, but. It is actually a novel now and not just a collection of disconnected words.

It's about 111,000 words (which is about normal novel size, just a bit shorter than The Cloud Roads for reference) and it will be out in hardcover May 2020 from Tor.com.

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I'd also like to thank everybody for the advice and reassurance on my post about anxiety and cats who hate each other on sight. We're going to try the cage idea, so they have a chance to get use to each other without being able to try to kill each other.

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