words on the page

Thanks to my mother’s good graces, I’m starting to get some traction on SHAMAN RISES. And let me just make this Note To Self here and now:

Dear Self: Next time you write a 9 book series with plans to have EVERYBODY RETURN in the last book, don’t make it a first person POV series. Mmkay? Love, Me.

Seriously. 9 chapters in and I still have 3 characters to get on screen. Jo’s thought of something clever and I have to make it all go horribly wrong. Momentum is beginning to pick up, which is a bizarre thing to say about a book that hit the ground running.

And MOUNTAIN ECHOES is out next week. This may be the first time I have *ever* had a Walker Papers novel go to release without having the next one in the series already finished. Although SHAMAN isn’t due for several weeks yet, I find it uncomfortable. *twitch* *twitch*

*laughs* A teacher friend of mine emailed today to say she had a problem. She (like all of us) is badly behind on her reading, she confessed. She has, in fact, only read the first three Walker Papers, and figured at this point she needed to start anew, so is waiting for the last book to come out before she reads them again. (Fair enough. I’m, uh, eleven books behind on Jim’s series, for example…) The *problem*, though, is that one of her students is doing a book report on WALKING DEAD, the fourth book…and my friend is desperate to avoid spoilers.

Could she, she wondered, send the book report to *me*, so I could read it and inform her whether the student had done an appropriate job to recieve credit?

*howls of laughter*

I said yes, but this is *not* a tactic anybody else could get away with. :)

Hah. Also–if I may be so pleased with myself as to say so–I am awesome. One of my MOUNTAIN ECHOES haiku people mentioned to me that she has a twin sister who actually introduced her to the Walker Papers. So I sneakily found out the sister’s name and sent another copy of the book along with the winner’s, without telling her (the winner. or the sister, obviously). Both of them were utterly flabbergasted, and I’m terribly pleased with myself. *does a little dance* :)

And now to bed, the better to put words on the page tomorrow.