Thankfully Busy

Roary Emojis Smiles and Love

It’s been a really busy time here, and even more than usual I am thankful that I can be busy.  I’m still working on strengthening and stretching all the muscles and tendons that were weakened as a result of severe injury to my right rotator cuff (upon which I had surgery in early April of this year), but even though I still spend a lot of time doing PT, I find I can do tasks that were impossible even a month ago.

Among these is spending more time on writing-related matters.

Two main projects have been filling my time.  Before my surgery, I had about 64,000 words written on a fourth Over Where novel.  (First novel in the series is Library of the Sapphire Wind.)  For a long while after my surgery I was unable to work on it.  However, I have now re-read the whole thing and done a huge amount of polishing.  I hope that as soon as next week I’ll be writing new material.

The other project taking my time has been reviewing the page proofs for Friends Indeed, the fifth novel in the Star Kingdom/Stephanie Harrington Honorverse prequel series I’ve been writing with David Weber for quite a while now.  We started with Stephanie at age ten, and in this book she turns seventeen.

Folks often ask me if I can work on two or more projects at once.  The answer is “Well, sometimes, sorta, maybe.  Depends.”  In this case, the fact that both jobs called for my “editor brain” rather than my “writer brain,” made it possible.  Another reason I could do both is that I can only read page proofs for an hour or so at a time before I find myself skimming.  Since skimming rather defeats the purpose of reviewing page proofs (which is to catch as many small errors as possible), I usually take a break, do something else, then go back to the proofs.

Baen Books has the very interesting policy of selling electronic Advance Review copies of their books available to the general readership, rather than just to reviewers.  The e-ARC of Friends Indeed went live just a few days ago.  If you’re eager to read the story before the book’s release in March, you can buy it here.  These are uncorrected proofs, much like the ones I’m working on now.

On that note, time to go read…  I wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving!