Nose to the Grindstone

Turned in the editorial revisions to Crisis of Vision today, and minutes before hitting SEND, a FedEx truck arrived with  hot-off-the-press copies of the mass-market paperback of Oath of Fealty and the hardcover of Kings of the North.   The revisions had taken an extra week because I got sick a couple of weeks back, sick enough that I couldn't focus on what the problems were (despite very clear guidance from Editor.  Sometimes the brain just isn't capable of analytical thinking.)  

Nonetheless, in the month of February so far, I've written another 30,000 words of Book IV, which is now handily over 70,000 words of rough draft.   (That's at least partly due to teriegarrison  and the Great Invitational Writers Handicap Race: see the graphic before it disappears from her LJ on March 1.)  Plus the usual blog entries on the Paksworld blog as we near release date for Kings, plus LifeStuff, which refuses to go away just because I'm busy.   Somewhere in there we had severe winter weather and a broken pipe and we were both sick.  Whew!

With the paperback release of Oath, the hardcover release of Kings, and the approach of the summer convention season, I'm backing off on Book IV to allow time for a) more blog entries, b) more promotional stuff, c) work on the map for Crisis, if it turns out that the map for Kings isn't adequate.    The Kings map is...and yes, I'm bragging on myself...gorgeous.   But at some point I have to finish the whole map, and that's going to be hours and hours at the drafting table. 

Our choir (and several others) are joining to perform Bach's St. John Passion this April, so I need to be spending at least an hour a day on the music until I have it rock-solid in my head.  Especially because we're singing it in German--which I don't know--and I discovered this past Saturday at the 5 hour introductory rehearsal that trying to sight-read even some of the notes and sing an unfamiliar language overloads whatever processing capacity is left after writing.

Nose is definitely firmly against the grindstone.