My next book, Rag & Muffin, is coming along well. I didn’t make the goal (big surprise) I had of finishing it last weekend, mostly because some of the action sequences at the climax are in heavy need of rewriting.
The rooftop chase scene with the cannnibal cyborg only needed light rewriting, and the sword battle with the demon-possessed robot armed with giant chainsaw-scissors was mostly okay, as was the wire-fu knife fight—but the running gun battle with the robot soldiers of the Chinese mafia is a complete mess.
As some of you know, I was working on Rag & Muffin even before I wrote Jake and the Dynamo. The stories bear some similarities in that both are about fourteen-year-old boys tagging along after violent, superpowered girls, but Rag & Muffin is considerably more bloody and brutal, and less funny.
So what took me so dang long to get this ready to publish? There are several reasons including some I don’t divulge to strangers on the internet, but the least private reason is that I needed to develop and polish some writing skills before the book could even be in a condition to publish.
Now that I have one novel out and another off to the publisher and coming out in a few months, finishing Rag & Muffin feels easy. Yes, it needs some work, but finishing it is no longer the insurmountable difficulty it once appeared to be.