This is a photograph of my desk, taken just moments ago:

What you see on the photo’s left side is my printer printing out the completed 9th draft of my latest Corrosive Knights novel, which will have this cover (the title will be kept secret just a little longer):

…and which I offered the following promotion for:

I began this latest draft of the book just a little over two months ago, on 5/12/16 and it really hurts to see it took me this long to get through this draft, especially since it took me about a month to do draft #8.

Why the considerably longer time?

Two factors:  First, because of this particular time of the year, ie summer, I’ve been traveling about.  Sadly, my travels do not involve any actual vacationing.  Instead, I’ve been helping my youngest daughter as she’s started up college and had to move in for her summer courses (it was recommended all freshmen take at least one summer course so they can acclimate themselves to this new setting).  Shortly, I’ll be moving her out as well as helping my other daughter move to her new apartment (thank goodness it is in the same building) and she starts her new year in college.

Maybe we’ll get some actual, honest to goodness vacation time.

We’ll see.

The second reason it took so long to do this draft is that while the first half of the book was pretty much good to go and required little more than grammatical/spelling corrections, the second half of the book required much more.

I was forced to get down and dirty and sift through almost every single damn line to get that second half of the book “right”.  On the plus side, the end result should make this second half of the book almost print ready.  It has to, given all the work involved!

But there’s little need to bore you with this, the bottom line is that I’m that much closer to being….DONE!!!!  FINISHED!!!!

Hurrah!!!

But before getting too excited, I’ll finish printing out this completed draft and, yes, once again revise it.  At that point I’ll have an even better idea of how far off we are from publishing this thing.

Regardless, we’re closer to the end.  We should be there quicker than you think.