Over and Done, or Done and Over?

No reflections on the world this week, just a huge Hallelujah! It’s over and done! Or maybe it’s done and over. Whichever way the old saying goes, Tangled Honor is put to bed. Done and over. Over and done. It’s now posted for sale on Amazon both as a paperback book and a Kindle e-book download. Man, am I glad.

After taking over five years to write Whittled Away, I’m really happy that Tangled Honor only took about fourteen months to write and publish. A good part of the reason I stuck with writing about a chapter a week was my membership in the Lockhart Writers’ Circle that meets weekly. Every other week it was my turn to submit about one or two chapters of manuscript to four other people to read and critique. Big thanks go to Tam Frances, Gretchen Rix, Janet Christian, and Wayne Walther. None of them are big fans of military historical fiction. Yet, they were my accountability group, and were extremely helpful in seeing the boo-boos in the manuscript and making word-smithing suggestions all along the way. Their candor was needed and appreciated, and their praise when the story clicked with them was needed even more.  

Of course, it was my wife, Sweet Nita, who read the whole printed proof over a couple of days while I was away with the manly men at Big Bend National Park, and asked a simple question that saved the day. She wondered why so-and-so at the end of the book knew something no one told him. It was a key something to the whole story.

I assured her someone had told him and she just missed it. I confidently took the printed proof to find it and show her. I looked, only to realize I had left out a whole key chapter near the end of the book. Somehow I had deleted that chapter from the manuscript during my “clean-up” efforts. Talk about a boo-boo and a thank-you owed to Nita.

To kick off my personal marketing of Tangled Honor, I rented a booth at a Texas Civil War reenactment near Houston last weekend to peddle the new book and Whittled Away to other reenactors and the spectators who came to the reenactment. Naturally, it rained off and on all day Saturday and a big fire ant mound surfaced right in the middle of my booth, but Sunday was a beautiful day, and I sold enough books to call the effort a success. More than that, it was just plain fun to talk to others about something I've written.

I’m now into Chapter 5 of the follow-up novel to Tangled Honor, with a plan for it to be over and done by the end of September of 2015. I’ll keep you posted.