Downtime

. . . and about time, too. The last few weeks have been far too busy, and to be honest I can use a break. We lost another developer last week—one who’d taken on one of the projects I’d worked on for a while—which means I got that project back on my plate. Lucky for me, it only has about four problems that need fixing, and three of those should be pretty easy to deal with. The bigger, more messy project (the one I mentioned in the previous post) seems to be coming together at last, in that it looks like the worst of the mess is cleaned up, and the thing seems to be working a lot more reliably.

Which means I’ve had a bit more time to work on writing projects, and I haven’t been quite so whacked by the time I get home that I haven’t had the energy to do something useful. And that’s meant that, at last, I was able to finish a major editing pass on The Voyage of Valerie McGrath this week (even though it took far longer than it should have). No bad thing, considering the deadline for content editing is less than a week away. (Stop press: email from editor telling me it’s gone off to line editing. Phew!)

The plan for this coming week, then: top priority, deal with any more editing on McGrath that comes back from my line editor as and when. Next priority, back to working on the sequel to Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia. My editor on that one came back with a herd of comments on the timeline, so I’ll be addressing those first, and I expect that to take all of this week at the very least.

And from experience, I’ll refrain from making any plans beyond that. Plans have a habit of getting changed or thrown out completely, in many cases before they’ve even been set in motion properly. Sometimes it’s better to just take it one day at a time.