It's not ignoring you if I'm working... Right?

It's been a while since I posted anything here. If you've been waiting with bated breath, I apologize. I've been busy, not only with householdy kinds of tasks--as all us househusbands, and virtually all women, are aware--but some writing related ones as well.

I'm doing a couple of dedicated reader critiques for Critters, and another review for one of my beta readers, whose story is moving along with only a couple of minor adjustments needed... in my opinion! It's all my opinion!

In the past week, I've been working on formatting Becka Sutton's The Storm Child for e-book delivery. It's the second book in her series, The Dragon Wars, and like Land of Myth, the premier one, it reads well. I'll be able to recommend it... once I've delivered the files back to her and it's available. Watch her web site for news. Note, Land of Myth is available other places; check Becka's Books page for details.

I set a pretty low goal for the year, word count wise, 15Kwords per month, except 30K for April (Camp NaNo) and 50K for November (NaNoWriMo). That adds to 230K words. Even with that low target, I missed February and March. However, April went over enough to cover March's shortage.

The target for April was set to finish the first 'vomit' draft of Background Check. While I got just over 30k words into it, it's not quite finished, but the draft is at 108K words now, and I really thought I should be done at 100K. Oh well. Start at the beginning and write to the end. It will be what it will be. Or possibly, there's room to cut!

However, I set BC aside because one of my beta readers finally gave me the complaint that's bothered all the critters who've read Freedom No More--and that just before I built the ebook to send it to Amazon! Importantly, he used the words I needed to hear to recognize what the issue was. Since then, I've been rewriting the first arc of the story. It's certainly different; I hope people think it better.

He also thought it could do with more cutting. At 116K, I'm inclined to agree, but I'd taken 4 or 5Kwords out of it to get to 116. I've not checked it with the new first arc, but it doesn't feel any shorter.

The last thing--that I'm going to talk about, anyway--is that I finally got off my duff and used the CreateSpace account I'd set up almost a year ago to publish Mercnearies: A Love Story in paper. My 12Worlds friend Brian Drake blogged about his experience, and mine mirrored it. It is unbelievably easy! I'll do a separate post on the process, but this is the result:

Front and back. This version's available at both CreateSpace and Amazon.

Comments and questions are welcome.