22 February 2009

the life of a writer...

Anyone who has looked at my release schedule lately knows that I'm busy as a one-armed paper hanger...and then some. I've been bouncing back and forth between edits and ARCs for three separate companies and four separate series plus stand-alones.

Not that I'm complaining. I'm usually a quick edit, sick or not...and sick I've been. And the edits have been staggered just enough to make the whole thing highly comfortable. Just as I come out of one edit, I pop into another. I'd almost swear my publishers were coordinating, but I know they aren't.

The hardest thing isn't time but rather the note-taking and organizing of house style A as opposed to house style B. Again, not that I'm complaining. My typical answer is, "Ah...your house style. I've got it." Grinning... I think two of my editors think I have it on a meta for ease of posting it back. House styles are something an author learns to roll with. I try to learn to include them, at the get go to save time in edits on subsequent books.

The other (VERY minor) problem with working in so many worlds and with so many publishers is that editing a story/book fires the love of that world and gets the juices flowing on it again.

What does that mean?

It means that I've got four panes open (at this moment) on my writing computer. One has the cleaning edit for the next Night Warrior book, since I've just cleaned and turned in the two before it to Kat at Phaze. One has the next Xxan story, Mating Season, (with 10K of it ready to rock and roll), because I just finished first and second round edits on Close Enough To Human with my editor at LooseId, and I'm waiting for line edits to arrive. (Note that I also wrote a bonus short for readers of Close Enough, before I settled fully into the new story.) A third has the next Kegin book, Double Image, (30k typed in now), because I did ARCs on Matchmaker's Misery for Kat at Phaze. The final has an Urban Grimm I'm playing with, because I just did edits on The Temptation of Eve for Under The Moon.

Such is the life of a writer. We love our worlds. We love our characters, and we love nothing more than adding to our own mythos, when we can!

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