January was the month of reviewing copy-edits for Cast in Atonement, while writing the Sagara book that is not yet titled — Magic School 2. Copy-edits are gone, and until page proofs arrive, only writing remains.
The West novel in progress is The Wild Road. I have broken 100k words, and I am hoping that the book will be 250k words long. Or less. To be fair, I was also hoping Hunter’s Redoubt would be 250k words long. Which it wasn’t.
The only West novel that has stayed on the right side of 200k words was City of Night. Which came in at 176k words. I honestly do not write long books on purpose, but… I write them to reach the end. Sometimes the end is farther away than I thought.
I think I mentioned that I have sold two more Sagara novels to Mira. Magic School 2 is the first book in that contract; Cast 19 would be the second. In theory. But there’s a possibility that I’ll have another Severn story.
The reason there have been only two Severn novels is: I had two Severn stories I wanted to tell. Novels set in the past are their own special challenge. While I remember the events of my novels, I don’t remember them in granular detail unless I read the whole book over again. And there are a lot of books T_T.
But for those of you who’ve read Shards of Glass, there’s one character introduced in that book that would fit in very well in the “past”, and is interesting enough that a story involving the Wolves and the warrens would absolutely work.
In the meantime, the unplanned events of Shards of Glass have made the writing of book two interesting. Things I did not expect to show up on the page did show up on the page. Which means that what I thought would happen happened in the wrong order, and information I thought would be revealed later, if at all, of course appeared on the page. Consequences of that are ongoing.
I like having consequences in my books. I like the fact that previous actions affect future actions. I do. But sometimes my writer-brain and my type‑A brain clash like a storm.
***
Other than that, some hardware failure caused huge amounts of stress (it’s as fixed as it’s going to be now), and yesterday, the wire drying rack we’ve used for almost 30 years finally collapsed into a flat heap, never to rise again. So yesterday was researching wire drying racks on the internet, and then finally buying one, which is entirely unlike actual writing.
Also: we have a minor plumbing failure that is set to become a major plumbing failure without intervention, so we will now have plumbers in our basement this coming Thursday for an entire day (hopefully only one), and a … plumbing bill that involves internal sump-pumps (as in adding one).
And now I will get ready to go to work at the bookstore. I will close with the front cover of Cast in Atonement; I haven’t yet received the full cover, with back text, which is what I generally post. As usual, I have the best team: Kathleen Oudit is art director; Shane Rebenschied, art.
DorisE 
Elissa Carroll 
Diana G Itschner 
E_ 
Patrick 
Tracey 
Jen 
Lauren W Isaacs 
Elizabeth 
Nevada 
Joey 
Chris 
Bryan 
Mary Allen 
br60103 
marinamoon 
Shafi 
Laura 
Veronica Kgore 
Sally 
Ke'Chara 
Mary Lynn Allen 
Jessica 
melanie allen 
Chris Carlucci 
RSS - Posts
I may have let out a tiny squeal about another possible Severn book. <3