Things are going pretty well right now. I finished making adjustments to Iron Night based on the edits that my editor sent me, and sent it to her on Friday. These were mostly big-picture elements – character motivations, pacing, building up some elements and toning down others. What happens now (based on my experience with Generation V) is that she’ll take the manuscript and start working on it line-by-line – does this wording sound right? Is there too much repetition in one paragraph? Is a particular idea or piece of information established thoroughly enough?

That’s where Iron Night is right now. I’m really excited about this book – for one thing, I got to take Fort deeper into the supernatural world that he’d been fighting to avoid. I got to revisit and expand some tertiary characters from Book One, as well as introduce some new ones. The world gets more complicated – and also longer! Generation V went to publication at around 85,000 words, but right now Iron Night is beating that by 23K. Given that my word-count goal going in was just to hit 90K, that was kind of surprising, but fun at the same time.

I’ve also gotten a peek at the Iron Night cover – and it is amazing! I’m under strict orders not to share it yet, but as soon as that gets lifted I’m going to put it up. Stylistically it’s similar to the Generation V cover, but I think it’s more dynamic and atmospheric. Can’t wait to hear everyone’s reaction to it!

This week I’m working on Book Three stuff – solidifying plans, doing some background research, that kind of thing. My hope is that at the end of the week I’ll have a working outline of the book. Right now I have a broad idea of major events and where I want a lot of the characters to be at the end of the book, but I’m still working on finer details.

There have been a few changes on the website since the last time I posted an entry – I now have a full character list page. Don’t look through that unless you’ve finished Generation V – it’s spoiler-heavy. I made it to help me with Iron Night (making sure I didn’t use the same names for background characters, being sure that I was consistent on birth years for my vampire characters, that kind of thing), so it establishes where everyone is at the end of the first book. (including, for several characters, deaths and who killed them). When writing Iron Night I found myself constantly flipping open a copy of Generation V to fact-check, and somehow I think that that will just be getting worse when I start Book Three, so I figured that it was definitely time to establish a separate series bible to avoid continuity flubs.

I also have the Reviews & Interviews page – links to all the reviews, interviews, guest posts, or media mentions that I know of. In the last two weeks what has been very exciting is seeing the occasional review pop up that I had no prior knowledge of – a blog review by someone who hadn’t been sent the book by either me or Roc. That’s been very neat, and I’m happy to say that the reviews have overall been really positive.

A few recent ones include:

Fang-tastic Fiction, That’s What I’m Talking About, Urban Fantasy Investigations, Owlcat Mountain, and Fangs For The Fantasy: The Latest In Urban Fantasy From A Social Justice Perspective. There’s a wide variety of responses and writing in here – I love seeing how every reader responds differently to various elements.

My most recent interview was over at Book Lovers Inc.. I also had the wonderful opportunity to write for SF Signal about deeper meaning in speculative fiction writing, which gave me the chance to write about two of my favorite books: Neuromancer by William Gibson and Singer From The Sea by Sheri S. Tepper. Check it out: The Veneer of Escapism.

So that’s where things are. I’m hoping to do that parasite post sometime this week, but I have a few things on my To-Do list, plus a job interview on Wednesday, and Tuesday is the publication for the latest Nalini Singh *and* Cassie Alexander’s latest Edie Spence book, so there will be some rather significant distractions. I’m also trying to introduce my three cats to the CatGenie (litter pan whose cleaning is controlled by TECHNOLOGY!), and it is Not Going Well.

Oh, last thing! Shiloh Walker wrote a great article here about how important Amazon and B&N reviews are for the success of a book. Generation V has twelve reviews at Amazon, and one review at Barnes & Noble. So if you read the book and enjoyed it, please post a review on either website, or both!

And if you haven’t read Generation V… well, wouldn’t you like to give it a try?

Choosy bat mothers choose Generation V for their adorable clinging bat babies!