Morning, munchkins. I’m…

Morning, munchkins. I'm back in my cafe, typing away. I groaned a little, when I got up this morning, realized it was almost 8 already, and that if I wanted to be at the cafe by 9, I'd need to shower and pack and go -- but I did it anyway. Partly discipline, partly guilt at having barely written while travelling. I managed about a thousand words on Saturday, but otherwise, nothing, nada, zilch. You'd think the flight would've been the perfect time to knock out a thousand words or two, but I played Age of Empires instead. Ah well.

So the plan for the rest of this week is to aim for two thousand words a day instead of one. This is called catching up, and hopefully it'll work better than catching up with exercise/diet is likely to. :-) I managed to gain a pound back over the weekend, despite being fairly careful most of the time -- I blame the delectable appetizers they were passing around at our author signing. I do okay exerting willpower over a dinner plate, but little crab puffs and stuffed mushrooms and prosciutto-wrapped melon balls wafting by on a silver tray have a power over me that I seem unable to resist.

I'm currently planning on scheduling a formal author photograph, with a professional, in mid-November. If I can lose four pounds by then (get down to 135) I will declare myself content. This is not an unreasonable goal. The only thing that's likely to make it even difficult is that I have three trips in the interim, and we have already established that I suck at eating well and exercising while travelling. But fingers crossed, we'll see what we can do.

I got a call from Leah, Marjorie's assistant, yesterday, telling me that they had gotten the manuscript back from the copyeditor, and that I should have it tomorrow. Exciting! Let's just hope that s/he didn't mark it up too much. I admit to a certain vanity about my own skills as an editor -- I think I gave them a pretty clean, tight manuscript. If the copyeditor found masses of stuff to mark up, then I'm going to be disappointed.

But in any case -- copyedits! Once this is done, there's just one stage left, galley proofing. And in fact, this is really my last chance to make any changes -- if I want to change a sentence or two, I'd better do it right now. If I change things in galleys, it's apparently expensive -- it costs them for every page I make a change on -- and in fact, it's more expensive than you'd think, because if the change affects the pagination on succeeding pages, it costs for all of those pages too. So I better get it right this time.

Currently word count: 33,424, sequential to the end of Chapter Six. Jed, in two more chapters, I'll have Part Two ready for you to read, I think. Dan, where are those edits for Part One? :-)