Yeah, I might be dreaming of Tioman, but I am working. On a Sunday. Reading. Can reading a novel be work? Yep, when you’ve already read it umpteen times over the past few months. Hell, when you wrote the danged thing!

I am reading both book 1 and 2 again, before book 2 goes to copy edit, because editors have suggested a few brilliant improvements to make to the latter.

The trouble is this: when you add a line on page 22, it has this horrible habit of making nonsense of something on p44. So you alter that, only to find that now something on p65 seems repetitive. So you alter that. But then, that gives the plot a hiccup, if not real indigestion…and so it goes on. Which of course is why you sometimes scratch your head over something in the books you read, thinking to yourself, how the heck could the writer have written that twice and not noticed? Or whatever.

So I am reading book 1 (which is not to be altered as it is going or has gone to the printers already) to make sure that something I do in book 2’s tweaking doesn’t make nonsense of something in book 1. Got it?

Now all non-writers are still scratching their heads, still wondering why I have to re-read. How can an author possibly forget something they wrote if it is a part important enough to affect the plot? Believe me, they can. And do.

The cartography is to tantalize…the talented Perdy Phillips has produced a humdinger of a map, a tiny portion seen above, and it has gone to the design team at Harper Collins. Wow. I feel publication is really getting close.

I have delivered my MS for Stormlord Rising, which is book two of The Watergiver trilogy (at least, that is what it is being called in Australia. In UK and US, I think they are avoiding giving the trilogy as a whole a name. It is to be referred to as the Stormlord trilogy.)

What a epic the title has been. Droughtmaster, Rainlord, Rainlords of the Scarpen, Drouthlord, Rogue Rainlord, Random Rain, Time of Random Rain, Stormquest, Stormseeker, The Watergivers, Stormshifter, Burning Sky have all been associated with this series at some time or another, and probably a few more I can’t think of off-hand.

(And, dammit, I still have a title to think up for Book 3)

Anyway, it has been submitted, and now I have to see if my editor ages ten years and mutters under her breath, ‘Bloody hell, what was she thinking?’

And so now the time has come to:

A. Give an abject apology to all those people whose emails have been sitting in my inbox unanswered for months and to tell you I am now beginning to answer them,
and
B. Start on the housework which has not been done for several months either. Yuk, yuk, yuk.