It’s finished.

On January 6, 2017 I delivered the revised and final draft of Magicians Impossible to St. Martins Press. There’s still copy edits to come, but the draft I delivered is the one you’ll read when the book arrives this summer. I just received word from my editor that the galleys are being printed which means within the next couple of months I’ll have an ARC (that’s Advance Reader Copy) of my book in hand.

So Magicians is, for lack of a better word, finished. And right now I’m trying to figure out where I go next.

I learned a lot about myself, and about writing overall, during the creation of Magicians Impossible. It was April 2014 when I first sat down over lunch with Brendan Deneen at SMP to talk about the book. It’s January 2017 as I write this. I’me taking a brief respite for some downtime – something I didn’t get over the holiday break because I was on deadline. Then, I get back into the next writing project.

So, from now to the book’s release I’m going to be shifting gears on this website, and spending the months leading to publication talking about the process of writing this book. What I learned. What I did right. What I did wrong.

The biggest thing I learned though, was that in the challenge of writing a book while raising an 18 month-old, was that time away from writing can be as important, if not more important, than time spent at my desk. It used to be I could hit 2000-2500 words a day, but with my child’s needs, I could only hit around half that.

And that ended up being just fine, because on those walks and visits to the playground, and the library, I found I could spend more time thinking about what I’d written that morning, and on what I was working on that afternoon, than the actual writing of it. That way when I did get the child down for their nap, and had a nice 3 hour block of time to write, I hit that daily goal much quicker and with greater dexterity.

There’s a definite difference in quality, I found, anyway, between the pre-child chapters of Magicians and the post-child ones. Of course, pretty much every post-child chapter was completely binned and rewritten from scratch, but that’s a story for another day.

I’ve long felt that writing isn’t just the time you spend at your desk. It’s not your word count. It’s not volume. It’s everything but that … and that’s something I’ll get into on our next installment.

Your not-so-subtle reminder: Magicians Impossible is available for pre-order now from Amazon, Chapters-Indigo, Barnes and Noble, and your local bookseller. I’ve been told that some have had difficulty pre-ordering in person; some systems haven’t updated to include the book in their pre-order sections. So maybe what is better is for you to call or visit your local and ask they reserve a copy, or give them the book’s ISBN number (ISBN: 9781250083524).