AQATSA: A visit from the Suck Fairy, contact info, and a sooper-seekrit meet-up

Betaing has begun!

My betas are wading into the mess that is my first draft. They will tackle the first few chapters while I work on the later ones (where all the real problems are).

Please don't pester me about an ETA for completion. It'll be done when it's done. Before the end of the year, I promise. Hopefully a lot sooner than that.

In the meantime, I've already trimmed 2000 words from the first five chapters, and that's just with my own minor line edits before I handed them off to my betas. So that's not too bad. The final draft is still almost certainly going to be the longest AQ book yet, but hopefully not quite the bloated beast it is now.

So for those who have been begging for excerpts, here is one wholesale cut I made from an early chapter. While I thought it was kind of interesting, it really doesn't say anything about Alexandra's world that isn't revealed elsewhere, and it's redundant since she takes the same van (with a different driver) back to the airport. And I had originally stuck this scene in as a "flashback," so it was doubly unnecessary. Hence, it was an easy cut. Nothing really exciting or revealing here, and it's certainly not my best prose (and it's completely unedited - yes, I know some of those verb tenses need to be kicked into submission), but if you're just dying for a little taste of AQATSA, here's a little taste of something the Suck Fairy left in my first draft, which I managed to expurgate.

( Enchanted Roanoke Shuttle )

Hey, I told you it was cutting-room floor material.

( Inverarity is no longer a Yahoo! )

Which brings me to my next item. A handful of you have expressed a desire to meet up in person. Frankly, the idea of a "QuickCon" gathering fills me with queasy introversion. However --

( If you happen to be in the vicinity of a certain geographical region where there is a big white house )

AQATSA: A visit from the Suck Fairy, contact info, and a sooper-seekrit meet-up

Betaing has begun!

My betas are wading into the mess that is my first draft. They will tackle the first few chapters while I work on the later ones (where all the real problems are).

Please don't pester me about an ETA for completion. It'll be done when it's done. Before the end of the year, I promise. Hopefully a lot sooner than that.

In the meantime, I've already trimmed 2000 words from the first five chapters, and that's just with my own minor line edits before I handed them off to my betas. So that's not too bad. The final draft is still almost certainly going to be the longest AQ book yet, but hopefully not quite the bloated beast it is now.

So for those who have been begging for excerpts, here is one wholesale cut I made from an early chapter. While I thought it was kind of interesting, it really doesn't say anything about Alexandra's world that isn't revealed elsewhere, and it's redundant since she takes the same van (with a different driver) back to the airport. And I had originally stuck this scene in as a "flashback," so it was doubly unnecessary. Hence, it was an easy cut. Nothing really exciting or revealing here, and it's certainly not my best prose (and it's completely unedited - yes, I know some of those verb tenses need to be kicked into submission), but if you're just dying for a little taste of AQATSA, here's a little taste of something the Suck Fairy left in my first draft, which I managed to expurgate.

( Enchanted Roanoke Shuttle )

Hey, I told you it was cutting-room floor material.

( Inverarity is no longer a Yahoo! )

Which brings me to my next item. A handful of you have expressed a desire to meet up in person. Frankly, the idea of a "QuickCon" gathering fills me with queasy introversion. However --

( If you happen to be in the vicinity of a certain geographical region where there is a big white house )