Saturday 26th August 2017

I’ve made a vow to myself that now the edits have been done, save for any tidy up work before sending it back to my agent, I’m going to take until the end of September off.
Technically I’ve been in this state since the beginning of the week, but have been so busy that I’ve been too fried to appreciate it.  With a bank holiday weekend in the UK, the plan is to do… well nothing.
And given that I went from editing draft 13 to writing the first draft of book 2 to editing book 1 again, I haven’t had an actual forced break from the novels for close to 18 months.    Sure I took a couple of weeks off to go storm chasing and 10 or so days for tournaments, but those breaks have been because there was something else that needed to take priority.
And so waking today and having nothing to do was… kinda weird.  I felt like I wasted the whole day.  Ordinarily, this would be a day where I’d be super annoyed with myself for procrastinating.  But the fact I did a bit of tidying up / housework, a bit of reading and wasn’t under super-pressure to achieve any specific target meant that I’ve got to the end of the day and feel… well…
I’m not sure how I feel.  On one hand I kinda enjoyed not having anything to do.  Even my mountain of School of the Sword work got put aside for one day to allow me to rest and recover from last week.  But there’s part of me that’s already going stir crazy.
Heck, a new Game of Thrones Soundtrack just came out which would be perfect to write to, except… I have nothing to write in the next month, save a short story.
I’m trying to force myself to rest.  I spent the morning watching incredible video on facebook from all my friends chasing Hurricane Harvey.  I’ve never been a big fan of chasing hurricanes.  With tornadoes, at least you can run out the way.  But with a hurricane, you are pretty much stuck in a location.  The videos though were incredible.  I saw friends taking shelter as the buildings that protected them were blown apart.  Scary as hell, and I sure hope that most people were sensible and evacuated.
But, I now kinda want to go chase one.  I’ve never fancied being stuck in a multi-story car park under 20 foot of flooding but in a hotel in the eye-wall?  Possibly.  Friends I’ve been in some pretty hairy situations with said it was insane… and that’s saying something.
This afternoon I had a chat with Kate about some ideas she has for novels.  Of course, we were blunt with each other but I really want her to take her writing to the next level.  She said some very nice things about Black As Knight as well.  I’m just not sure I believe her (in the nicest possible way) but I’m very happy she likes the book.
Her comments came back this afternoon and they were the only bit of work I allowed myself to do.  All really good points, but nothing too major.  It covered all the things I was worried about though.  I just need to give this a spell check and then it can go back to my agent.  That’s quite scary so I told myself to do Kate’s comments today and then the spell check tomorrow.  I’m not expecting much as I’ve gone over it in previous drafts.
That’ll mean the novel will be with my agent on Monday.
My plan is to then try and flush it out my mind.  Nothing will happen for a while, during which times I can relax and enjoy my September.
Frankfurt Book Fair is mid-October.  Maybe that’ll prove an interesting time or maybe things are a bit tight to get everything ready for then… but I determined not to try and think about it.  1st October I intend to start work on the second draft of book 2.
In many ways, we’re now entering the eye of the hurricane… where everything now goes calm.  I’m not ruling out another edit, given that we’ve been here before.  But I’m feeling good about this book and where it’s at (probably bolstered a bit by Kate’s nice comments).
We’ll see.  I’m trying to not think about it too much beyond getting the spell check done and the manuscript sent back.  Instead, I need to find something to occupy my time for the next month!
If you want to follow more of my journey, then be sure to check me on my social channels.  Likewise, if you’d like me to expand on any point mentioned above, please say so in the comments.

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