Wednesday Wanderings

So I just turned the manuscript for Scylla and Charybdis back over to my editor (I still get a giddy little thrill saying that, call me a dork) for her review.  I've been swimming in tweaks, changes, additions, deletions and hoping that I've managed to hit all the notes for a little over a month, and now it's time to stop and breathe.

What will I do until the next round?  On my next book to submit / query, Unnatural Causes, I am partway through transcribing my paper edit, but honestly, I've been editing so much that I need to step away for a bit.  So ... time to give the new novel, Surgeburnt, some love.  It's a huge change from Scylla and Charybdis:  a chaotic, magic-infused Earth as told through the first-person eyes of a snarky and pessimistic narrator.  And the trick with Surgeburnt is that I'm actually telling two stories at once:  the "now-time" sequence of events, and a dramatized backstory of how it got to that point.  It's a fine balance, filling in enough detail to make sense of the now-story, while still leaving questions to play out in the then-story:  how did this happen?  Why?  What's missing?

So my current plan is to focus on Surgeburnt through the end of the month (gee, maybe I'll come up with a better title in that time, too).  After that, I'd like to break up my attention and do some shorter pieces - poetry and flash.  The ideal would be one a day, but with my work schedule, that may not be feasible.  Anyone have an idea for prompts or a scheme I might follow?  It would be fun to have an ongoing flow of inspiration.

Then ... back to Unnatural Causes.  I'm planning on another pass before I look for beta readers; guessing that won't be until early 2017.  And, of course, when I hear on Scylla and Charybdis, that goes to the top of the pile.

That's the plan, anyhow.  And we all know what happens to plans ...