So.
Like (I'm sure) many other writers out there, I read any book I'm writing at any given time as I'm writing it. I send it out in nice tidy completed chapter chunks. I wait for feedback on said chunks.
I have no particular process. I start at the beginning of a road, with people I want to spend time with, and I send those people out on the road, and I write about where they go, who they are, what happens to them, how they grow. Nothing particularly odd about that.
That means the book - any book - is set into my mind/soul/whatever in chunks. So I generally wait until at least a month after I've written it before I sit down and read it cover to cover, as a single story, as a book.
No difference with
New-Slain Knight. In fact, because it was written with a gun to my head and ridiculous deadline and the bitter dangling carrot of not being able to begin the fifth Kinkaid until I finished the fifth Haunted Ballad, I never did get that cover to cover read, for reasons other than publisher-editorial. In other words, I never quite got the taste, or the measure, of that particular book.
Well.
Galleys went out this last week, and apparently have been arriving places; Kirkus will review it in the 1 October edition. A galley also made its to Cat Eldredge, at the excellent
Green Man Review.So I'm having the uncanny experience of having a reviewer write me emails as he reads it: "Typo, page 68!' Things like that.
Said Cat, in an email, #1:
You really should do more of these. It's too good a series to stop now.After I responded with the reasons - publisher letting the series die, no support for it, no paperback edition and unable to get the rights back, wanting to work on the Kinkaids, not wanting to let Penny and Ringan get stale, etc - said Cat, email #2:
You do know this is the finest novel in the series?So here I am, curious. I sat down, purely for my own sake as a reader, and opened it.
I'll tell you what, I think he's right. This is the best of the Haunted Ballads. Which, when you consider the circs under which I wrote it, is rather nifty.
A writer writes. Sometimes we get blocked and sometimes we get busy and sometimes we get lazy and sometimes we get sick. But in the end, a writer writes. It's what we are, as much as any musician making music. It's what we do.
And sometimes the result - even though every subject line when you send it out to WiP readers is
Chapter {insert}, PLEASE DON'T LET THIS SUCK - is a killer good book.
