Yes, I AM still alive!

So I bet you guys have been wondering where I've been the last couple of weeks.

The answer: I've been bunkered up in my writer's cave, trying to get my head around the sequel to Atticus for the Undead. So far, the book is following several of John's Rules of Novel Writing. For instance:

1. However many words actually end up in the book, I've written about 3 times that many. It never fails. In between normal editing, scenes I end up re-writing because I decide to take a different approach to them, and scenes I end up chucking because they just, well, suck, what looks like a 50-60k word book is usually a 150-180k word book on my end. This book is definitely no exception. Combine that with:
2. Beginnings are always the hardest. By the time I get to the end of every book, I'm always really looking forward to starting the next one, if only as an escape from the many frustrations I've invariably encountered with the current manuscript. What I always forget is that writing the opening chapters of a new book can, well, suck. You have to introduce (or, if you're writing a sequel) re-introduce your characters in a way that makes them interesting to the reader, give the reader a taste for the flavor of your world, involve the character in some sort of event that hooks the reader into your story while you're introducing him or her, and do all of these things in a way that isn't ridiculously clunky or heavy handed. If you have more than one point-of-view character (all of my books so far have had 2, including this one), you have to do that for each character. Fun fun fun!

What does this mean for you? Hopefully, nothing! I'm continuing to work on the story and still hope to have it ready for you by year's end. But I thought you should know that just because I haven't been posting lately, doesn't mean I don't love you, or that I'm evil--well, I am evil, but that's not the point! Or, okay, it is sort of the point, because I put a lot of my evil into my novels, so this whole enterprise is sort of powered by evil (which is kind of awesome when you think about it), but... ah, you know what I mean. I think. I hope. Maybe. Kind of.

Keep the faith,

John