Edits, Beasts and Cookies

“I’ve walked through death and out the other side for you – not just for Aufleur or the Kings, but for you personally, Ashiol Xandelian, and I’d do it again in a second. Question my loyalty once more and I’ll stab you in the throat.”

I’ve been neglecting this blog! Truthfully I’ve been neglecting all my blogs, though it’s perhaps a little less obvious over at my main one.

I haven’t been blogging about writing. Partly this is for a very good reason: I haven’t been writing. For most of the school holidays, apart from a brief flirtation with proofing (the world would fall into a black hole if every contracted writer wasn’t given a pile of work just before Christmas) I have been very much Not a Writer. Partly this is because I received the unexpectedly awesome news that Book 3 of the Creature Court did not need a structural edit. This is the writer equivalent of being handed a giant box of cookies with LESS WORK FOR YOU printed in chocolate icing.

Book 2, incidentally, required two structural edits, so this was doubly exciting.

The effect was that I actually did get a holiday, hanging out with my daughters, catching up on housework, and not putting pressure on myself to use my work brain at the same time.

But now school is back, the baby is in two days a week daycare (which is extra nice because she has proven to be the Escapologist of Doom and every hour she’s awake and at home I am far too busy making sure she doesn’t destroy herself to get anything else done) and I am staring down the barrel of my copy edits for Book 3.

I blog less when I’m not writing. Even less when I’m not working at all. My bloggiest times are when I’m in deadline hell, or doing Nanowrimo, or something equally crazed.

So, here we are at Book 3, which was once called Saturnalia and I’m pretty sure now will be called Reign of Beasts. It’s been a long journey. When I started the Creature Court, many years and several RORs ago, I was still in the midst of academia and still in love with my Classics PhD thesis. I wasn’t a mother yet. And my publishing dry spell had turned into something of a drought.

Books 2 and 3 still felt a long way off, back then. I was busy grappling with Book 1. I didn’t know how it was going to end, but every idea I had then about the final volume turned out to be completely wrong. Except for the first chapter.

I always knew I was going to do something a touch wacky with the structure of Book 3. Something that might surprise my readers. I had this plot in mind, and made quite a few changes to Books 1 and 2 in order to make the odd structure of Book 3 feel like a natural, if still wacky, development. So coming to this final book, and discovering that my plan actually worked, it paid off (at least, the best freelance editor IN THE WORLD thinks so and I’ve come to really respect her opinion) is remarkably freeing.

And yes, I should be working on those edits right now. Why else would I be blogging?