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