Yes! I finally finished the rewrite of my manuscript (take 3)! After sharing it with some trusted readers this spring, and upon the advice of my now-editor, I embarked upon a full rewrite, not an insignificant task. The initial, seemingly-small change my editor had suggested was to set the story in a different era, which just could not be done with a few line-item changes here and there, so a full rewrite it was. It’s been slow going, but I finally got the thing finished and sent it off to my editor. Now the real work can begin, I guess.

Next step: Wait for her changes (hopefully they will not entail another full rewrite) and keep plugging away to get it as close to perfect as we can. If she likes it, and we can plow through the edits expeditiously, I’m (cautiously and optimistically) aiming for publication this spring. Of course, I’d like to find a conventional agent and/or publisher, terrific, but with all of the options now available for self-publication, I am awfully close to “damn-the-torpedoes/agents-full-speed-ahead” mode. But it is, of course, too early to make that call just yet–most likely by year’s end.

So what will I be working on now that I’ve “finished” that (that stage of it, anyway)? Well, there’s my bread and butter writing (grant proposals, newsletters, articles, etc.), but I’ve already got 2 other novels in progress, one a youth fantasy and the other…well, harder to pin down, but it’s definitely more commercial fiction. Which one to work on now is the harder question: my kids, for obvious reasons, really want to see me finish the youth book. (They’ve definitely influenced the first few chapters, so they’re understandably eager to see “their” story continue.) But the second novel just draws me to it–I can hear the characters chattering away in my ear so often that it smacks of insanity. I wonder if I just wrote the damn thing they would finally shut up…

Ah, well–only one way to find out, isn’t there. Back to work.