I’m cuddling a wheatbag, snuggled under a chunky blanket and sipping hot black currant. It is COLD! Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the cold, but in years gone by we’d work down to -2 (current temp). This year? We only had our first frost this week! All in all, a bit of a shock to the system but I have my blanket and my hot black currant and my wheatbag so as long as I don’t have to actually go out, I’m all set!
NaNo is now over and it was definitely not one of my more productive ones. I topped out at around 15k on Hassatar, which is disappointing, but, as I also realised I have some massive pacing and timeline issues, I’m not utterly downcast about it. The big issue is that I have action taking place at the same time in five or six different timezones and two of those timezones have more than one location, so while I know WHAT is happening, I need to work out the when so that things make sense. There’s also a lot of research involved, which largely got put on hold during November and which I now need to go back and do. All in all, it’s a big lot of work (and that’s before you add in the actual writing part!), so I will be taking a day over the holiday season to get it sorted out. Not necessarily getting all the research done, but at least getting the timeline sorted, with notes about just what does need to be researched.
So, if that’s Hassatar, what of Ved’ma? It was mostly on hiatus last month so I’m now starting to pick it up again and trying to work out what needs to be done. As mentioned back in November, the last third needs an overhaul, which I’ve started. Unfortunately, it’s led to the realisation that the middle third also needs a bit of restructuring, so the answer to what needs to be done is: a lot. Fortunately, I have some time over the holidays where I can give it my full attention (rather than doing a bit here and a bit there), which should allow me to finally nail the structure down and might even allow for me to finish the draft.
In rather more positive news, however, Ved’ma now has cover art. As ever, done by the fabulous Enchanted Ink, I think it might be my favourite cover so far (and I’ve absolutely loved all of them!) and I can’t wait to see it in print…
…so I really do need to get the book finished!
On the Sage front, nothing much has changed there. I’m not planning on spending much time on it over the course of this month, although I will take some time over the holidays to do some planning so that when Ved’ma is finished drafting I can just step straight into Sage.
Finally, on the Elsehere front, I am hoping to get a couple of tie-in short stories written over the holiday period for use as Friday Fiction pieces in the new year. These will be stories that don’t, directly, relate to the books but will flesh out some of the other characters. More on those, when they’re ready!
On the Friday Fiction front, this month’s story will be going up on the 23rd and is tentatively titled “Always The Understudy, Never The Lead”.
Finally, the Music Monday series started on Monday. I haven’t (yet) set up the playlist on Spotify, but I will get that sorted out before Monday’s post goes up. (The end of November proved to be a bit more hairy than I was anticipating – normally, I get this sort of thing done well in advance, but this time I’m playing catch up!)
And, I think, that’s it.
Happy reading 🙂
Grace and Fiction 