First: Battle has been turned in to my editor at DAW. It is not finished in the sense that it is now a book — she’ll read it, and she’ll make notes of the things that don’t work or are not clear enough, and I’ll do a revision pass to correct the things I can address.
After which, it will go out to a copy-editor and from there, to production, which will then print out galley pages, which come back to me. This makes me cry (and I apologize in advance because I know I whine a bit on twitter when I am proof-reading). There is nothing worse than reading your own books looking only for your mistakes, typos, etc. All of the good things become invisible: you’re left with the sense that you have Failed Everything.
Not all writers do this. Violette Malan, on twitter, posted a “yay! Galley pages!” because their arrival means it’s a Real Book. Yes, I sent a tweet in response possibly questioning her sanity, but we’ve known each other as DAW siblings for a number of years, so I have hopes she’ll forgive me.
Second: the third iteration of Touch is, to my mind, a working book. It’s not a finished working book, but it is much closer than it was. I have been working on Touch in parallel to Battle, and when I finish Touch, will return to Cast in Sorrow.
I will also start the next House War book, which is tentatively titled: War.
Third: Some time ago, I self-published all of the West-related short stories as ebooks. This was because they’re almost all unavailable in any other format. I promised that I would do a print on demand version of the six stories in one collection, and I am now waiting on proof copies of that. The title is: Memory of Stone and Other Stories. The printing is done through Lulu.com, because: print-on-demand. I’m reasonably confident, unless something went wrong with the uploads, that I will, sometime next week, have a finished book that will not embarrass me in public.
This is because I did not do the typesetting or the cover-design myself. If I had done the former, it would look like an MS word document, but printed; if I had done the latter…well, crayon drawings from your five year olds would probably have better design sense.
I’m sorry this has taken so long, and is not quite finished — but for people who are print-only readers, I should have something to report by next week. I am literally only waiting on the proof copies to check to make sure that the printing of the file worked correctly.
Fourth: I have been posting on my LiveJournal account in the past couple of months. I use LiveJournal to talk about the non-book related things that occur to me, because sometimes readers don’t care about anything but the books.
I’m like this. I will visit an author web-site to find out about when the Next Book is expected, but I don’t actually want to read through — for an example entirely specific to me — 52 knitting posts. I’ve tried knitting. New stitches magically appear when I’m trying to knit a scarf. I’m also not a foodie. My cooking skills are laughably basic. Reading about gourmet cooking therefore makes my eyes glaze.
I assume that people are like me — but without my various interests. So: I post about writing, about my books and bits and pieces related to them in the various stages of their publishing life, and I answer questions about them here.
I post on LJ about the things that are not book-related but are of interest to me. Several of my LJ readers have probably never read a book by me in their life — they’re reading those posts because the posts are interesting to them, and they also probably don’t want to be interrupted with publishing information about books they don’t care about.
Kathy Scappace 
Stephanie 
Ciara 
lavanya 
P. Vang 
David Y 
mandi 
ElizabethN 
mandi 
shauntel 
RSS - Posts
Do you have any information about when _The Broken Crown_ will be available as an ebook?
I’m not meaning to be a “nag” but I keep checking Amazon daily looking for it.