Yesterday, I sent SB3 off to my fabulous, amazing, wonderful, I love them so much, alpha readers (who are also fabulous, amazing, wonderfully talented authors. . . having writer friends is invaluable, but that's a whole other discussion). The draft is done, which means I wrote the story, edited the story, and in this case, rewrote a good chunk of the final battle because originally it wasn't meant to be the final battle. Now that there will be a book four, I had to go back through the draft and tie up some loose ends, untie others, and set things up for the next book. It was a great learning experience of what happens when your plan doesn't survive contact with the enemy -- or in this case, the invaluable experience of your publisher asking the valid question, "Are you sure this isn't two books?"
Because yeah, the answer was. . . crap. He's right. It's two books LOL. So after a bit more work than I usually have to do at this stage, the draft is done, woohoo!! However, done is a relative term. The draft might be done, but there's a whole lot of steps between where it's at now and publication. I'll need to incorporate feedback and edits from my alpha readers, and then send it to Space Dad AKA Kevin Steverson, the universe creator, for approval. Kevin is amazing. He reads everything before it gets published in the Salvage Title Universe, and you need his stamp of approval before it goes to CKP.
After that, it'll go through the official editing process, and I'll have to adjudicate (review and approve/reject) the edits, and THEN it goes to Chris Kennedy. It only gets published after the Factory Boss approves it. So there you have it, lots of steps to go, but we're getting closer!! I'm pretty happy with how this story turned out, and I can't wait for you to see what I put Kailey through. . . uh, I mean what Kailey and the Knights got up to this time.
In other writing news, I've got two anthology releases coming up this month!! A spooktacular horror anthology, Thirteen Stories of Horror, coming out on Friday the 13th from Three Ravens Publishing. Nick Steverson and I wrote a charming not-at-all-gory little tale about moving to a new town and making new. . . friends. The other release is in Bill Webb's Last Brigade Universe, coming out on October 17. My writing mentor, Casey Moores, and I have braided stories in that one, and it was a blast working those out together (I say that like he didn't pretty much hand me my story on a silver platter lol). It was so much fun plotting out a braided story that we ended up doing it again in the 4HU Phoenix Initiative, which was published in June. If you haven't read our stories in that one yet (Casey's Buff Orpington and the Sinister Scientist Bunnies and my Duck Me), I highly recommend. Am I biased? Obviously! But it might be relevant to my next writing project, a Depik Companion novel set in the 4HU!! I'm going to try to knock that out before the end of the year, which means participating in NaNoWriMo (50K in the month of November).
All right, folks. This ended up being a longer blog post than I planned. If you made it this far, how about a tiny, ittsy-bitsy little snippet from SB3?
"Tell me, little bunny. How far would you go to save yourself?"
Hehehe. . . until next week!!
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