the Author

Category Archives: writing

Posted in Audio books, Cast, Essalieyan, self-publishing, writing, life.

I’m writing to you all from Australia, where I have come on my writing retreat, which used to be an annual thing until Covid. I have an unfor­tu­nately tight dead­line, and I’m neck deep into Cast in Atone­ment, which is not yet done. I hope to be finished before I leave Bris­bane. And when I say finished, I mean: finished first draft. After which I will revise for submis­sion, and then submit. Shards of Glass is due out at the end of November, so I’m fielding a few ques­tions about that — but my head is fully entan­gled in the Cast novel, so Shards feels like it was written years ago (it wasn’t). My toe has improved enough it doesn’t bother me much, but according to X‑rays taken a week before I left, … Continue reading 

Posted in writing.

I’m sorry I appear to have missed March >.<. March was revi­sion of Hunter’s Redoubt, which went into April; the rest of April is revi­sion of Shards of Glass, and taxes. I’m still revising Shards of Glass. I don’t have the cover yet, but the (front) cover is now up on various retailer sites. I’ll post the whole cover as usual (front and back) when I do have it. I am collating infor­ma­tion for taxes, which are currently in the virtual shoebox of email, Devon­Think and a couple of other elec­tronic repos­i­to­ries. While revising. So: there’s a bit of gloom, and given April, there’s also been rain. What we haven’t really had is the annual April snow­storm (yes, I’m knocking wood). Hunter’s Redoubt is with the copy-editor now, so I expect I will soon be … Continue reading 

Posted in Cast, Elantra, Essalieyan, writing, Mira.

Very early February, granted. I have finished Shards of Glass and have submitted it to my editor at Mira, which means it’s not tech­ni­cally finished until revi­sions have been requested and completed. This gives me a needed mental break from a book that was almost two weeks late, so I can return to it with a less panicked and more objec­tive frame of mind. When I say “more objec­tive” this is on the scale of writer neurosis, so keep that in mind :). While I wait on edito­rial input for two books, I have started the ramp up to writing two books; I have more of a head start on the West novel, but will take at least a week to reread all of Sun Sword and make notes. I tend, in real life, to forget … Continue reading 

Posted in writing, life.

First: December. I finished the first draft of Hunter’s Redoubt on the 24th of December – in time to panic about Christmas tree & presents & Christmas eve dinner. It’s 303k words long, so… the longest first book in any series I’ve written T_T. It has gone off to the editor. Hope­fully, it will go off to artist, too. I did not finish Shards of Glass, but I’m working on that now, in the lull between submit­ting a draft and getting edito­rial feed­back. My hope was to work on both books at the same time – as I do for most of a book’s life. But usually when I hit the end of a book, I put the other on pause. I even­tu­ally had to do that with this one, because the end of a book eats all … Continue reading 

Posted in Cast, writing, chapters.

It’s October 2022, and at the end of November, 2022, Cast in Eter­nity will be published. It was a book written entirely during Covid lock­down. I wonder if, a decade from now, I’ll remember that as clearly. I’m mostly hoping I won’t. I try to post the first chapter of an upcoming book a month before release day. So: this is the post for that. The first chapter of Cast in Eter­nity is here, but you can also find it on the bibli­og­raphy page for the CAST novels. *** I am contin­uing to write, both Sagara and West words. The Sagara words are for the as yet unti­tled Magic School book — but I am sad to say that my Magic School book is … not quite what I thought it … Continue reading