As you know, Bob, after almost a year away from writing I nailed my butt to the chair last year and finished Typhoon Warning. Then I nailed said butt to said chair once again in late March/early April of this year and got the damned thing edited. It is currently in the hands of the Editor and I look forward to her extensive use of the Editorial Machete when I start doing the next round of edits.

Alongside this, I also started a novella called Goddess of the Nile set in the Hidden Empire series. Originally it was meant to be a palate cleanser when I needed to get out of the weeds of Typhoon Warning—a fun romp with Henry, Louisa, Fyodora, and Callum in Luxor, Egypt that would serve as a bridge story between The Crimson and the Black and To Love a Wild Swan. Granted, it was a bit of a slog at first, but I put that down to me being woefully out of practice with writing, and it got easier as I delved further into the story. It had to be put on hold when I started editing Warning, but once that was off to be sliced and diced I pulled Goddess back out and went back to work.

You may have heard someone say that writing is like exercising a muscle—if you don’t do it regularly, you lose strength and coordination. Once you get back into the habit of writing, however, you build that muscle and writing becomes, well, if not easier than at least not nearly the slog it once was.

All of this is to say that, whoa, my writing muscle is back in shape because I have been cranking on Goddess this week. I’ve finished 18,000 of a projected 30,000 words, and if I keep on at this pace I should have it done by the end of this upcoming weekend. Which is absolutely perfect timing because I should get the edits for Warning back by then, and my brain is all swole and ready for more words, growr. And once that’s released into the wild, I can work on editing Goddess and plan a release around the beginning of July while I work on writing Mage of Fire.

Come hell or high water, I will write and publish my 20th full-length novel this year. And then I just have to work on my marketing, tra la…