Update: Intermission

Recent Reading: Sagacious Blade by Sh... Should You Call It Book One?

Update: Intermission

Okay, so this past weekend I paused the major WIP (Tano’s next book) and picked up Midwinter. This was largely because it’s just been sitting there mostly finished since Christmas, and partly because it just seemed like a nice time to work on it, so I did.

Oh, I should add, we had heaps of snow last week, but with no wind and deadly cold, so the snow fell gently and softly all night, did not stick to anything, could be fluffed softly out of the way with a broom, and therefore we didn’t see widespread power outages as happened in early January when we got all that ice. Which was good because “deadly cold” is great for keeping the snow from weighing down the trees, but we literally got down to below 0 F. Brrr. Not a good time to lose power.

We do have our generator now, by the way, and the tank of propane, but it’s not all hooked up, so it would have been ironic, or at least unfortunate, to have the power go out with the generator right there. But as the power did not go out, no problem, and that’s a moment of irony (or, I mean, misfortune) I’m glad to have avoided.

But the reason this is relevant is that I did get a lot of work done earlier in the week because everything was closed most of the week, and that was all work on Tano’s novel.

Then, on Friday, I switched to Midwinter. And I messed with that all weekend and it’s … probably … not quite finished. But it’s almost all editing at this point, so it’s basically finished. And I guess I can go ahead and get a cover for it any time, since one of these days I’ll want that cover. It’s certainly long enough to stand as a separate novella. It’s not going to be quite as long as Shines Now (78,000 words). But it’s going to be over 60,000, I’m pretty sure. I’m going through it, tweaking this and that, and I wound up adding a tiny bit of a subplot, and so that’s where I am right now with it.

AND

Just so you know, I also wound up re-chapterizing (re-chapterating? Re-chaptinating?) a lot of the book.

I cut the first chapter in half; now the part where Taranah is talking to Mitereh is chapter one, while the part where she and Daniel have started their journey toward Chaisa is chapter two. I did that because I wound up coming full circle, with the very last chapter being a very short chapter where Taranah is again talking to Mitereh. (Spoiler, but, I mean, not really.) So it makes sense to basically have those conversations serve as a frame around the main story. And once you have a couple really short chapters, does it matter a lot if some of the other chapters are also short? So I took every scene break where we shift pov and made those chapter breaks.

Except for one chapter, where we have a series of vignettes from … let me see … seven different points of view, one after the next, in quick succession. Which I like quite a bit, but obviously I’m not going to break that up into seven extra-teensy chapters.

Anyway, this means that the LAST chapter that appeared in my newsletter was, I don’t remember, chapter seven, maybe. But the next chapter to appear will be CALLED chapter thirteen or something like that, even though it’s the next chapter in order, because the numbers have changed dramatically. I’ll add a note about that so as to avoid startling people who get the newsletter without seeing this blog post.

It also means that I’m actually getting ready to send the updated version here and there for critiques, and also probably post it at my Patreon. I guess, since I’m this close, I will finishing this primary revision before the end of the month and most likely post it at my Patreon in March, though I’ll still probably set the preorder for it at Amazon for November since it’s basically a Christmas story.

So … that was last week! A bit unexpected with the sudden shift in focus, but productive!

Coming up: Only five days left in February! I definitely, for sure, will finish the draft of Tano’s next book in March.