STORMLORD RISING is of course the second book in the Watergivers trilogy, and HarperVoyager have put up Chapter 1 here, and will put up Chapter 2 Friday the 22nd, just to get you all worked up enough to put your orders in at your favourite bookstore, right? The release date in Australia is March 1st, 2010. Which is about when Book 1, The Last Stormlord, has its release in US and UK.

And above is the cover, the work of the wonderful UK fantasy/SF artist Vincent Chong.

Oh, and for all you cold country peoples, that white stuff is not ice … it’s salt.

Happy reading!

Jason Nahrung, Australian horror writer and author of The Darkness Within says this of The Last Stormlord on his blog:

Larke’s world-building is a great strength of the story, the dryness and heat permeating the fabric of her society, with enough touches of the fantastic to excite the imagination. This, combined with a bloody climax, leaves the reader keen for the next instalment.

Read the whole review here.

The other day I mentioned I was bored with the book. I think that is actually a sign that it is ready to be launched into the hands of the copy editor. In a way, I’m bored because it is as good as I know how to make it…which I think is not bad – i.e. I don’t think it is going to bore anyone else!

So how many times have I read it?

• I read it as I wrote it. 1x
• I read and re-work whatever I wrote the day before, then proceed with the new day’s writing. 2x
• Halfway through the book I read all that I have written, so by the time I finish the first draft, I have actually read and re-worked it two and a half times. 2.5 x
• I read it through and make major structural alterations 3.5 x
• After those alterations I read it again to fine tune. 4.5 x
• After the fine tuning, I read and rework it again and send it off to the beta readers 5.5 x
• While the beta readers and reading it, I work through it again 6.5 x
• With the beta readers input back to me, I work through it again 7.5 x
• I read it again for dialogue-spelling-naming-distances-times consistency/continuity and to turf out repetition 8.5 x
• Read it aloud for flow/rhythm and to catch typos and grammatical errors (and I still don’t catch them all!!) 9.5 x
• Send off to editor. When I get it back, read to tweak the areas suggested. 10.5 x

Which is where I am now.

• The next re-read and re-work is when I get it back from the copy editor 11.5 x
• Final re-read of the galleys (aka arcs, first pages) for any egregious errors 12.5 x

And that’s it.
Quite frankly, some of the troublesome bits get a lot more than the 12.5 times.

This is a huge door stop of a book – 180,000 words. It comes in at 619 pages in the Australian/UK paperback size (i.e., not as small as the American mass market paperback, not as large as the trade paperback.) I have not only read it more than 12 times in the past 12 months, I have re-worked it at each draft.

No wonder I want to stop.