It always strikes me, when I use that phrase, “I finished a book,” that I usually mean something different than 99% of other people do when they say it. Possibly 99.7%. I, of course, generally mean I finished writing a book, as opposed to reading one. (Although let me tell you, there are times anymore when finishing reading one seems like as much of a triumph…)

Anyway, so on Monday I finished the (oh my god so very) rough draft of REDEEMER, which has been hanging over me for what feels like forever. It came in at 104K, which is about where–in the past couple weeks, anyway–I thought it would land (previous to that, 120K still didn’t seem out of the bounds of possibility). It needs more work than my manuscripts usually do when I finish the draft, which is sad, but that’ll teach me to try to do like three different difficult things in one manuscript. @.@

On one hand it’s a huge relief to have the book done. On the other, finishing it triggers the rest of the production to-do list, and that looks like this:

Redeemer Wars (Redeemer) To Do:
– get cover art done
– finish manuscript
– revise manuscript to fix notes, descriptions, language, etc
-submit to editor
– revise to editorial specs
– resubmit to editor
– do line edits
– submit to copyeditor
– submit for cover design
– submit for page layouts
– get ISBNs
– submit for econversion
– deliver to kickstarter backers
– submit for possible audio book
– submit for reviews
– submit for self-publication

Obviously this does not all happen at once, but it’s a REALLY LONG LIST and I’m almost certainly forgetting things. So I’m glad to have the book done but AUGH SO MUCH TO DO NEXT. This is why writers like traditional publishing. @>@

Anyway, none of that is happening this week. It’d be nice if none of it was happening even in February, but I’m already horribly late with the book and need to move on it more quickly than not. Still, I need a few days away from it, at least.

In the meantime I’ve reached 41.4K words written for the month of January and it seems like sort of a pity to not push it up to 50K. Sadly, the thing I really kinda wanna to work on isn’t likely to give me that kind of wordcount, not unless I do a great deal more of it than I could reasonably expect in the next five days (so what am I doing instead of working hard on it right now? Writing this blog post!), whereas writing a new Old Races short story would give me close to the wordcount AND get a new story ready for the Patreon crew and is therefore what I obviously *should* be doing.

I’m prolly gonna do the other thing anyway. :) I have a–well, let’s face it, an unrealistic–goal of getting a book out every other month this year, and getting going on this thing might make that possible. Yeah. YEAH. So THERE. SEE?!?!

…or something. :)