Nearly Done

Just about finished the first draft of Stealing Fire - maybe one, two thousand words from the end, but couldn't get up much steam to actually get to the end of this draft today. There's a lot to change, though possibly not as much as I changed in Stealing Light; I ripped fifteen or twenty thousand words out of the first draft of that, but I really don't think I'm going to have to cut that deep with this one. Using the Mac-only Scrivener software has helped a lot for organising the manuscript and giving me a better overall sense of the book's structure than I've previously managed to get using more standard software like Microsoft Word (and before anyone mentions Open Office, it really doesn't work at all well on a Mac. Especially not with novel-length manuscripts).

I'll probably take a couple of days to lounge around before I start on the second draft. After that, hopefully it's no more than finessing to get the book into its final shape for submission. And then a more thorough outline of book three, followed by actually writing it. Lots to do. There's a bunch of things that have been happening I could talk about - the Hugo awards and why I sometimes wonder if they've become devalued, why the Olympics are possibly going to be an enormous public relations disaster for China, the election of the KMT back into power here in Taiwan, Tibet - lots of things. But I've just been too busy with the book to pay much attention to anything beyond my laptop and the four walls around me.