Oi Clod!!

[Clodfobble]

I know.



Okay, look, here's the deal: I'm writing a book, in the vain hope that it might eventually be publishable and thus provide some income to my family. (And that really is the motivation: I love writing, I always have, but while it would be cool to say that I'm good enough to actually get one on the shelves, it's always just been for my own entertainment--up until I lost my steady contract audio gig awhile back. Being really and truly "unemployed" hit me a lot harder psychologically than I thought it was going to, and I really need some way that I can contribute. Yes yes, I'm contributing by raising the kids, blah blah blah... tell that to my psyche.)

So anyway, I decided I was going to finish and polish the story with the best chances of being marketable. For a first-time sci-fi novel, the standard range is 80,000 to 120,000 words. Any less, and it's not a novel, any more and publishers want you to be an established name before they'll make that kind of commitment. So the number in my sig file is counting down from 80,000, because while the final product will be longer than that to some degree, before that point it doesn't matter how good it is, it's not a novel.

But being so close to the end, my work has shifted much more toward revision. Don't get me wrong, there's definitely content still missing--three and a half scenes at the very least--but I need to revise what I have before I can really know where those scenes are going, and I need time away from it so I can revise with fresh eyes. In the meantime I've let my mother and husband take a look at the work in progress so they can hopefully offer some feedback, but I'll need to digest what they say and incorporate those changes in addition to the other revisions, so it's going to be awhile before I really get back into forward motion again.

Long story short: I'm still working on it, it just doesn't look like it. I'm very confident at this point that I'm going to really finish it, probably by the end of the year, which was my original goal. I really appreciate everyone's support.