Happy Friday, squiders. How’s May treating you? I’m slowly going out of my mind.
Reception for Deep and Blue has been pretty decent. On a sadder note, Turtleduck Press, which I’ve been a part of for many, many years (we went live at the end of 2010–Hidden Worlds was one of the launch titles–but we’d worked behind the scenes for at least a year leading up to that) has decided to close its doors. It never quite cemented into the publishing press we wanted it to be, and as time went on and life did its thing, it became harder and harder to maintain our publishing schedule.
Definitely sad, but it is time.
I’m in the middle of Chapter 26 on the Book 1 edit. I’m essentially rearranging the end of the book; nothing that substantial, but a lot of fiddly things. I’m adding in two new chapters, moving a couple of things between viewpoints, overhauling things like that. A lot of the wording is old, probably because, substance wise, I haven’t changed a lot over the various drafts. But that does need to be fixed. Whee.
I’m not making progress as quickly as I would want to. Part of that is that May is a notoriously rough time of year, what with school ending and all the responsibilities that entails. The other part is that I get squirrelly the closer I get to the ending of a story.
This has been true forever and I’ve never quite figured out how exactly to fix it, so it tends to manifest as me getting tiny chunks done until we’re finished. I think it’s a combination of the excitement of finishing a project and the fear of a project being done. I’ve mentioned before that I tend to feel a sense of…loss, almost, when I finish a big project (which is why, sometimes, I will work on multiple projects near the end of a big one, to fend off that particular feeling, though this is not always feasible).
And with this story, after the revision is done, the plan is to write a query and submit to agents, to try and go the traditional publishing route. It’s been a long time since I’ve queried with any real purpose, and it wasn’t terribly fun, and from my writing groups it sounds like it’s only gotten worse. So there may be an element of that added in to the usual mix.
Still, I am excited to work on this part of the story. The ending of Book 1 has stayed more or less the same since I initially imagined the story *mumblemumble* years ago, and it’s always been in pretty good shape. I think the planned changes are only going to make it shine more, and I’m excited to make that a reality.
Which makes the squirreliness all the more annoying.
Anyway, wish me luck. See you next week, squiders!
