Another Interruption Over

This will be short, because I need to fall on my face.

It's time to clean up Quite Contrary and start thinking about publishing. I got through the first editing pass on about a quarter of it, then went into writing starvation. So I wrote the next chapter of The Inscrutable Machine in a fit of madness.

Enjoy.

I will fall on my face now.

Flop Flop Flop

I finished writing Quite Contrary! Since then, I've spent my time lying around, gasping like a dying fish. I started out heavily emotionally invested in the book, and by the end it consumed me, all the more so because I was battling intensely stressful life circumstances that tried to stamp out my creativity entirely.

It will take awhile for me to recover enough to write anything new, although with me I have no idea if 'awhile' is 'a week' or 'a month'. Ideas are starting to pop in my head, so the process of recovery is processing. I threw myself so deeply into the book that I have to do other projects before I can proofread it. I've gotten some beta reviews, and I can barely look at the criticism. I'm just too wrapped up in the book, still!

I'm going to have to learn to shoulder it. Reactions to the book have told me that this is not going to be a universal pleaser. This is, finally, the 'pushing the edge of what people can handle' book. It needs trimming and strengthening, but I'm going to go ahead with it anyway. Unlike Wild Children, this looks like it will be a 'some people love it, some people hate it' book, and the most important factor is how each reader reacts to Mary herself differently.

Meanwhile, I have lots of detritus to clear up from a couple of months of steadily growing insanity. I have to update my blogs. I have to join Google+. I have to learn to use twitter to advertise without being an ass about it. I have to see friends and relatives I abandoned. And my current 'project', making a paperback version of Wild Children. That's actually going pretty well.