Waiting and Doing

As I await word back from my editor, my beta reader, and my cover artist, I continue to work on my other works, a sequel to Explorer that I’m just calling Corps of Discovery Book 4 for now, and Openings the first in the Chronicles of Hayek series which explores Tim Bowman’s opening of the first gate (as described in the prologue of Surveyor). CoD Book 4 is at about 3,500 words and Openings is at 20K. I’ve decided to work on them simultaneously because I really want to get the Chronicles of Hayek out but I also know readers like good sequels (and you’re gonna love the premise in CoD Book 4).

My editor (in Washington’s San Juan Islands) says I should get her edits back by the 25th. My cover artist is going on Vaca (she’s in South Africa) on December 15th, but the first rough draft of the cover looks good, and I have no clue when my Beta reader extraordinaire will wrap up his read (but he apparently stayed up hours past his normal bedtime and had to force himself to put his tablet down to go to sleep the night he got the draft). So, what this all means is that with any luck, I’ll have Explorer out in time for Christmas. Of course, some things that factor in are how fast I can do the rewrite (should be less than two days) and how long it will take Amazon and Ingram Spark to release once I submit.

I suspect this will be a dual release, with the e-book coming out before the paperback. Stay tuned.

Things might slow down a bit in the next week or so as I start a new forensic accounting for a fraud case (it looks interesting – then again, they all do to me)

Oh, and as an aside, since I also teach a course at Digipen Institute of Technology called Geography and Cartography for Worldbuilding, I just thought any geonerds out there might be interested in this blog post by author Michael Tedin: Worldbuilding 101 – How to Draw Maps for Your Fictional World (Part 1). I don’t know Tedin, but we apparently went to the same school – the University of Washington.