Sorry for the extended radio silence but I have been flying, people. I’m currently at 53,380 words on Shadow of the Swan and intend to top that off at 54,000 by the time I’m finished today, leaving 26,000 to go. Easy peasy.

The goal right now is as follows:

• Have the first draft done and dusted by 8/21.
• A quick edit done over the weekend to fix things I know need to be fixed but don’t want to spend time on right now.
• Off to the betas and editor on 8/24 while I dive in for a deeper edit. I rely on the betas to find any grammar/punctuation/spelling errors, plus anything that doesn’t make sense to them, and the editor does a high-level pass to make sure the story flows well from beginning to end.
• Ideally I’ll get all of their edits back in 8/28. While I’m waiting on that I’ll do a weasel word pass, a grammar/spelling/punctuation pass, and a fine polish.
• When all the edits arrive, I’ll get everything incorporated, polished to a shine, and formatted into ebook form by 9/2.
• 9/3 I read it through as a reader would, catch any last infelicities and fix them.
• 9/4, I upload to Amazon for the 9/8 release.

I genuinely can’t wait for all of you to read this — I’ve been describing it as the Brendan Frasier-era The Mummy meets Bram Stoker’s Dracula with a touch of Carnival Row, and it’s an absolutely wonderful romp. I so very much enjoy writing in this world, and if people like it and buy enough books I may even get to write another book set in it. Let’s hope!

In other news, I got the rights back for Deep Water so that will be edited over the weekend, formatted, and released as soon as the Evernight ebooks are down from all online retailers. I’ll probably work on the print book after I send Swan off to the betas and editor on the 24th.

Even better, this means that I can finally start releasing the new books in the Olympic Cove series so you can expect to see Cross Current (Book 4) out in December, and the remaining two books sometime in 2021. Yay!