Just posting the books, and hoping for the best.

I've decided to just post my books -- Rule of Vampire is live -- and then just leave them alone.

I don't feel comfortable asking people to buy my books, but of course, if don't ask them -- they probably won't.  But so be it.  I'm a writer, that's what I want to do.


I cut 18,000 words from Faerylander (formerly Nearly Human.)

I completely reorganized the chapters. I've undoubtedly got sequence problems, probably duplications, probably missing information.

But I wanted to get a rough cut down, and then deal with the flow.

I think this will be a better book this way.  I'm guessing I can cut another couple of thousand words if I'm ruthless enough, and I wouldn't mind cutting even more.

All the books that came after this one are much faster reads.  I spent a great deal of the first third of this book on set up and exposition.

I'd like to cut as much exposition as possible, and still have the story make sense.  In order to do that, I'm probably going to risk taking out necessary info.  So I'll have to ask my editor to figure out where I've done that.

So I will probably cut nearly 20% of the book (after having cut 10% of the book earlier).  Both the beginning and the ending are completely different, but wasn't able to deal with the plot problem in the middle that has bothered me all along.   I'm afraid that it is such an integral part of the plot it can't be fixed.  I keep trying to explain around it, which makes it better.  But still...

I know I solved some of the timing issues -- things are now happening in the book where it makes more sense for things to be happening.  But for every 3 problems I solve, I seem to create 2 new ones.

This is the 5th complete new version.  I found myself taking out much of what I did in the 3rd version, which was an attempt to 'humanize' the story.  The need to humanize wasn't wrong, but the way I went about it didn't really work in hindsight.

This is just an extraordinarily difficult thing to do.

I believe that I've probably improved the book by 20% each time, which would mean it's twice as good as the first version.  ;-)


Meanwhile, I wrote a single chapter of As You Wish.  So I'm trying to do both projects at the same time.