Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Third version of cover has been seen. Close, so close. I have proofed the formatting in the book version of the manuscript. Twenty seven changes later it is complete. Should have been fewer, I know. There were a few hiccups I think I could go back to… but that way lies madness.

So this is another version of finished. Oh! I just remembered I wanted to add something to the legal page.

This is the part where it is hard to let go. My book is about to go off to college, and I won’t be there to see what it’s up to, who it socializes with, if it goes to class. It’s almost all grown up, but has no idea what the future holds for it, and neither do I. Scary. Exciting. Scary-exciting.

The proofing was a good read, I did have a form of separation from the text, felt new things and appreciated the story’s movement in new ways, more as a reader than as its writer, which was unusual for me. I’m not sure I experienced that with either of my first two books. I understood some of my feedback better, and why it was given, which was cool.

This is the part where the writer of fantasy gets to fantasize about how the book will be received. The usual delusions of instant success, critical acclaim, dollar signs. You think you’re over that, understand it is foolish, but maybe the difference is now I can laugh at my delusions more than indulge them. However, the power of them is still there, even if I can pretend I’m viewing it as a game I’m playing with myself rather than an earnest unrealistic hope. Perhaps I have achieved ironic distance, the curse of our age.

This is a book about belief, about doubt, about ego and surrender, about freedom and illusion. About certainty, losing it, struggling to regain it, looking at what the shape of a life without it would be like, finding out if that life can be accepted. Right now, it feels like it is the embodiment of what it is to try to make something new, having no idea if what you make will be a chocolate parfait, or a shit sandwich. So it’s a book about the writing process, disguised as a fantasy novel about a crisis of faith. Got it.

Each book thus far written has been a struggle to express an idea, wrap it in stories and characters, make it make sense as only fiction can, if we let it. There has been a certain amount of catharsis involved for me at the end: the release of the emotion invested in the creation. I’m not quite there yet. It is an interesting tension to live with, I think only to be released with the book itself, and maybe not for a few months afterward.

Remember folks, death of the author. Take the text as you find it!