Getting extremely close to sending out my book! Very excited. It’ll probably go terribly and turn into a miserable experience, like everything else related to writing and publishing fiction, but right now I am excited. I am particularly excited with the revisions I’ve made. I think this last revision really pulled the book together.

What’s interesting with this book is how in every revision I’ve pulled back and made the book smaller, less plot-focused, and less dramatic. That’s not normally where you go, but in this case it felt right. The core of the story is in the main character’s sense of longing for a particular kind of connection with other people, and that’s a longing which gets blown up when there’re too many high-stakes events going on.

It’s been fun! If no agent picks up the book, it’ll probably be the end of my fifteen months of working on it, but they won’t have been wasted. I do feel much more able now to write the sort of books I want to write. Although I still love science fiction and fantasy, and I think my writing is much more exciting and high-stakes because of it, I do think I’ve needed to unlearn some habits I picked up from writing adventure stories.

Not that I think adventure stories are bad, it’s just that I don’t want (right now) to write them. I want to write books that focus more on the interior and on the prosaic, and you can’t really do that if the police are showing up and people’re being kicked out of school and all this craziness is going down.