What I'm working on at the moment.

Heads-up: I'll be critting queries, first chapters and or synopses next week at Unicorn Bell. If you've been struggling to get your submission stuff just right, feel free to send all three in and I'll see if I can root out any issues. Please send submissions to unicornbellsubmissions(at)gmail(dot)com. Put my name in the subject line. 

Right. On to today's post. 

At the moment, my biggest priority is to prepare the two War of Six Crowns books for publishing. The first book, The Vanished Knight, basically means that I need to apply all the proof-reading I'd sent in before Etopia published it. Interestingly, though, I'm finding lots of errors that somehow got missed, despite the fact that Etopia has a very rigorous editing style.

I guess that goes to show that no matter how you try, you'll never be done editing.

I guess I could do all this later, but there are some benefits to going through The Vanished Knight before getting into the sequel.

Firstly, it lets me pick up all the strings I left loose for the rest of the series. There are lots of them, and many are very fine and subtle. The other big thing it does is let me get a feel for the narrative voices again. There are five, all are different. And the thing is, I've been working on other stuff in between so it's not just a matter of launching back into things.

That's the thing that I'm worried about most, making sure that the voices keep feeling like they're progressing naturally as the characters develop. Plot and character arcs are easy to keep track of, but voice... voice develops as the stories go on, and it has to feel natural or it won't come across right. Especially when the reader will potentially read the two books sequentially. (Likely when they'll be coming out at the same time.)

And when the sequel requires more revisions and edits, having the voice right is just plain helpful.

So that's what I'm doing at the moment, but I'm hoping that by Wednesday  next week I can start revising the sequel. I want to take about two months to finish those revisions before getting into edits.

I have to say, though, it's just too damn good to be actively working on something again. What are you busy with at the moment?