Work In Progress - August 2012

It’s been a while since I issued any update, and there’s been a reason for that - beyond simply not having anything to share. I’ll [maybe] get to that in a moment, but first I do have some progress to report.

[caption id=“attachment_1132” align=“alignright” width=“187”] Cover - Letting Go[/caption]

At long last I put the finishing touches on the first draft of “Letting Go”. It’s a bit shorter than I would like, but it’s long enough, so baring any sudden flash of inspiration - always a possibility but unlikely in the current circumstances - the story is complete. I will be letting it ‘simmer’ for a month or two before going through it for another edit, and then sending it off to my beta readers.

I may still get the book out in the fall as originally promised, but that’s starting to look doubtful. It all depends on how things go, and ’things’ are very up in the air at the moment. Hopefully you’ve had a chance to read the first excerpt that I posted a few weeks ago. I’m planning to post another one at some point, but I still haven’t decided which passage to post.

Right now, I’m turning my attention back to my very first book, Journey to Angkor. I wrote most of it nearly five years ago, and it’s been out for more than a year now. Despite my best efforts, there are still a lot of errors in the final manuscript, both word-use and grammatical. I’ve decided to edit and re-issue the book, as part of a plan to issue an omnibus edition of all three Journeys stories as a single ebook. Although I don’t plan to make any significant changes to the plot, I’ve already found one minor point that was never explained, so there may be more changes to the text than I planned. Editing is rather dull work, but it suits my frame of mind at the moment.

Right now, it’s all about my frame of mind. It took longer than planned to finish the draft of “Letting Go” because I’ve received some news from my family back in the states that’s been unsettling to say the least. The news was not really unexpected, but it’s amazing how much even bad news that’s expected can affect you. It seemed, at least for a while, like the muse had completely deserted me, and I didn’t even try to work on my manuscript for days.

I eventually got back to writing, a little, but it’s not like before. I’m simply too distracted by events I have absolutely no control over, which are happening on the other side of the world, while I sit in Bangkok waiting for someone to tell me, “it’s time.” While distraction is sometimes good for my writing, taking my mind off a problem so that inspiration can sneak in the back, this kind of distraction is not good.

But, this is the advantage of being an independent writer. I have no contracted commitments, so I don’t have to force myself to work if the muse isn’t with me. I believe he will return one day, probably when I least expect it. In the meantime, I have other things to do, like edit the Journeys series.