Amendment

I hate writing these posts, as I'm sure you're sick of reading them. But I don't like dragging out the delivery of bad or disappointing news, so here it is.

I did not finish The Lost Princess in Feb as I planned, nor did I get it to my editor. Piffle.

If you've been keeping up, you know my Jan and Feb were hardly calm and relaxed. It was as though the cosmos has unleashed fierce darts and aimed them all right at my family for a while there. I didn't get the writing done in Jan that I wanted, which put me behind in Feb. I felt though that I could still catch up, and still finish the book by my deadline.

And then the unthinkable happened. I lost the story.

Not literally, but in my head. Everything that I'd mapped out and planned turned to mush in my brain. There was no conflict worth mentioning. It wasn't writer's block--it was something far worse. Like a writer's harrowing. Or writer's torment. I could write words, but none of them led anywhere useful. Ugh.

So, basically, I could have finished a book for you but it wouldn't have been worth reading. It would have been, rather than the climactic ending to a fun series, boring and disappointing--to say the least.

Rather than dwell on this disastrous failure, I've chosen to move forward with my plan. I know this means at some point one of my projects for this year won't happen, that in order to finish TLP I will have to shelve something else that I had planned to finish this year. It's interesting, and I thought I'd share, that I was really bothered by all of this until I spent some time at the temple on Friday. It's amazing what a reset in one's perspective can accomplish.

I've already scheduled another edit for later in the year. Hopefully, I can finish TLP in April and turn it in for my May edit deadline (which was supposed to be for City of Light). This means, of course, that my scheduled release for TLP of May 27th won't happen barring a miracle (which I don't discount, but also don't expect). I'm sorry about that, but at the very least I want to have it out a year after the release of The Tyrant King. I can do that.

But, as I said, I'm moving forward. I'm completing my project for March, which happens to be a ghost writing project I've been looking forward to for some time. If I finish ahead of schedule, I may take apart The Lost Princess brick by brick, or word by word, and see what can be salvaged.

And in the mean time I need to think of horrible, awful things to do to my characters.