My mind has been taken over by editing

I've done very little in the last few weeks but editing. There are really several stages in the creative process. There's the initial idea ("Wow, I have an IDEA!"), immediately followed by doubts ("I don't really know how to write this – there's too much research involved – I have too much work on my plate"), then comes the writing itself, which again has several stages of enthusiasm and fear. Then you edit and submit the text. Then the text comes back.

And if anybody thought that by then – with a contract in pocket – things would be easy, they are dead wrong. The real work is to get the manuscript from 90-95% good to 100%. Personally, I think that's 50% of the work with very little of the fun. There's no fun in editing, just relief it's over and I solved a problem.

My writing life has also slowed down considerably. Last year I had 10 releases. This year, two are firmly planned and another one is very likely. I expect to finish two more projects (mainly big rewrites of stuff that's done), but that's it.

But the truth is, I'm no good at short stories. Even my novellas come out at the long end, and most projects I started as novellas have turned into novels. So, yeah, the two books coming out this year are the gay sici-fi novel "Father of All Things" (title might yet change) with Carina Press in August, co-written with Rhianon Etzweiler, and the gay fantasy novel "Scorpion", which should be out from Dreamspinner in May.

So, currently I'm doing the last edit on "Father of all Things" (at this stage, it's only details, after a fairly comprehensive re-write in January/early February), and the edits for "Scorpion" will hit my desk in the next few weeks.

I've been editing so much all I really want to do at this stage is writing. There are plenty of ideas, three books that want to be written urgently, but edits come first.

The good news is – next time I'm posting here (in two weeks), I'll have a sneak preview of edited text from one of the releases.