Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

The dog days of summer are again ended. I wrote about that last year, and what a sweet summer child I was, thinking I would be done with rewrites in 4-6 weeks with grammar checks and proofing to follow.

Well, a mere year later, those stages are done. The book is complete. The title is decided as The Gardener and The Goddess, because The Slaves and the Djinn, while cool to my mind, was misleading in ways I couldn’t justify. I need to choose random arty titles in future that have nothing to do with the content of the book.

The blurb has been written. I’ll polish it a bit having left it alone for a few months, but it has been reviewed and is ready to go. By polish I mean I might change a few letters in one word. So it becomes another word, not just a shortened version of what currently exists. Writers, amirite?

Looking at last year’s blog I can’t lie, I have a LOT of things written for the next book, but a functional outline is not one of them, largely because what I’ve wanted to do has evolved in the last year, so the outline I have would no longer support all those new ideas, and one of those ideas is to fundamentally alter the pace of the book’s opening. It was previously frantic, now it is not.

I’ve been reading some recommended short stories by Jorge Luis Borges recently. They and he are undoubtedly brilliant. He moved me to interesting head spaces I wasn’t sure what to do with, so I floated there and let the ideas and allusions and insights rest within me a while. Normally when I read a writer who is that insanely talented I get depressed by what I can never be, but for some reason Borges just made me happy to exist somewhere in his authorial milieu. I know he had definite opinions about other writers, and they were not always gentle, but it seems in his stories he is also very generous in spirit towards writers and the act of writing, even at his most absurd.

How and ever. I’ve been sat on my arse too long. This blog is partly my way of holding myself accountable, so that is what I’m going to do.

By this time next week I will have news on my cover artist and my formatter. By this time next week I will have reacquainted myself with the process of obtaining an LCCN and entering my copyright notice with the Library of Congress. By this time next week I will have forward momentum again.

The long road beckons, so I walk forward again.