I have been absent for all of November, in part because of revi­sions and in part because of general stress and anxiety. I have copy-edits for Cast in Conflict on my computer now. Copy-edits are the part when I realize: Oh, I’m an idiot. Again. (If I made no mistakes, if I were compe­tent the first time, I wouldn’t have to deal with … my mistakes. And neither would anyone else. Para­lyzing writer-brain at it’s finest.) Writing has there­fore been slow. Well, worse than slow. I real­ized, with the new West novel, that I had made a crit­ical error (char­acter intro­duc­tion) and that the book would be much better if I fixed that. Which means, because of my process, losing 110k words of writing and starting again at the … Continue reading →