Listening the the new Bruce Springsteen album, "Magic," and thinking about novels. Lizzie called earlier to tell me that I got a big box of books delivered today -- sounds like my galleys of my novel The Wannoshay Cycle have arrived! Needless to say, it's hard staying focused on Day Job stuff. I wanna go check out my book! It's not the finished version, of course, but it's close enough. Only eleven years in the making...

I'll be sure and post some cheesy photos of me coddling my books later tonight.

In an interesting bit of timing, I think I've finished up all the heavy lifting on my latest novel, Sixteen Miles from Everywhere. I'm still fine-tuning the synopsis, but it's getting closer to something I'll feel good about sending out to various agents or editors, and the novel is essentially DONE. And I'm really, really happy about the ending -- I almost forgot to write a key part of the final scene, so having my dragon swoop down and snag the bad guy was a lot of fun. Does that make me weird?

(And as part of the novel two-step, I also have my World's All Nations out to a couple of Interested Parties, so I'm feeling some good writerly mojo. Just hope I didn't just jinx myself, saying that...)

And finally, I'm casting about for ideas for the Next Novel. I could rework my old young-adult sorcerer novel, as I'd planned, or pull together a new fantasy novel from ideas I had in my recent "Broken by Dawn" story (outriders on boars! evil cartographers! doors between fantasy worlds!). Or that idea I was playing around with about software startups in the late 90s... Or maybe something new.

Then there's the publicity work I want to do for the Wannoshay novel (coming out in January, yo!). Maybe I can use that big box of Heart's Revenge for some prizes, along with some of those galleys from the Wannoshay book...

Of course, my writing time (and sleeping time!) is about to dwindle in about six weeks, so maybe I should take a break from the novels and try a short story or two... Hmmm. Maybe. Later!