Can you believe it? A new update from Dave!

Yes, yes, I know, it's been more than forever since I last updated this thing. Life and work have gotten the better of me, and as I said when I first started this thing I'm not a diarist, so I have no compulsion or need to write down my every move. This is to be a chronicle of the writing process, and there are long periods of time where I'm either just writing a first draft or revising and there's just not much to say.

So here's the latest and greatest. I'm about twenty pages from finishing the second draft of THE WORDS OF MAKING. I received my edit letter from my editor at HarperCollins back in early August -- far later than I had expected it. I turned in my draft in January, and I expected to hear from her in four months or so, not eight. But she had an editorial assistant move elsewhere and editors are chronically overworked and understaffed, so things slipped. She told me, quite apologetically, that to keep the publication schedule I needed to get my revisions back to her my September 8, which was a little less than a month away.

Which was utterly impossible, even if I'd been writing full time. Some of her changes were easy to make -- a general tightening of my prose, etc. But some other character-related issues were going to take some thought, and there was no way I was going to figure it all out in a month.

She gave me until November 1 (my 41st birthday). I have missed that deadline, but not by too much I hope. I hope to finish the revisions tonight or tomorrow, then take a week to go over the most heavily revised parts before shipping the manuscript off.

I do not know when this will be published, but I would not expect it until late summer or early fall at this point. Sorry! I will let everyone know the date as soon as I have it.

So that's what I've been up to! I'll try to be a little better at posting going forward.