Featured image: “Chibi cute witch” by SweetCherryVenus.
I’m currently finishing up a project, so I am behind on what I want to do with the blog, so behind that I even missed International Cute Witch Day yesterday, which is a serious sin for a magical girl fan.
I have some new posts and reviews I want to write, but for now I’m in the “I have to get this novel out of the house or I’ll go crazy” stage, so that takes precedence. Here are the updates I have at present:
Dead to Rites
Everything is finished on my end for the sequel to Jake and the Dynamo. I honestly though it would be out last month, and I’m not sure why it wasn’t, but I’m not here to point fingers, so I probably wouldn’t tell you even if I did know.
I’m going to start harassing some people to find out what’s going on. In any case, the good news is that I should have two new novels out in the near future, in rapid succession.
Rag & Muffin
I am in the final editing phase. I’ve made the changes my editor requested and I’m now going through the printed draft with a red pen. After I make the final edits, I’ll run the whole thing through a spelling/grammar checker, which is tedious, but which also catches a few typos and other errors that even close editing can miss.
After that, it will see the publisher’s proofreader, and then I’ll make any final edits and be quit of it. I pride myself on submitting very clean drafts, so if Rag & Muffin is like Dead to Rites, the turnaround time will be quick and the final changes will consist of little more than a few missing commas.
The submission draft should be out the door by the end of the weekend.
This is actually my first novel, and it’s a long time coming. It took this long to build up my skills and actually produce this version, which is now worthy of publication. It also took a fair amount of research. I’m glad it will soon be seeing the light of day.
I do, admittedly, regret somewhat that I didn’t get it published earlier. It’s a dark subversion (of sorts) of popular children’s stories, and it would have been more unique in that regard some years back, before the current dark phase of magical girls became so prominent. However, Rag & Muffin might not exactly qualify as a magical girl story anyway: It’s more of a grim take on the “Wake up, go to school, save the world” motif, which to my knowledge has never got this exact treatment before. On overarching theme in the book is that childhood heroics can have unintended consequences.
Also, some of the obscure medical issues in the book are now less obscure. At the time I first started working on it, hormone blockers for children were an esoteric medical subject rather than a national debate. But so it goes.
