Almost done. Again.

Yes, I've said it before. Yes, I do tend to get excited about the completion of each stage of writing a book, so I think I'm almost finished when there are actually several time-consuming tasks that remain. As of 2:00am on October 31, Gart's Road is completed. The proofreader finished the whole thing, so I picked up all of those marks. Then I followed Dennis L. McKiernan's advice. I printed it all out again and read every single word aloud, making additional edits along the way. So the story is now DONE. Woo hooooo!

I still have to work on the formatting for both e-books and paperback. The cover art is looking amazing, and I'm hoping it will be done within the next few days, a week at most. Once that's in, then I need to have the actual cover created. THEN it'll be available on Amazon, Smashwords, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, etc. It's just a matter of days now. Honest!

One of the reasons I'm so excited is that I really enjoyed this book. It was a ton of fun to write, and reading it all the way through on the final edit was more fun than I expected. I'm just dying to get it all tied up with a nice little bow and get it out there for others to read in the hopes that some will enjoy it as I have.

After this, I plan to take a short break before diving into Book 3. It won't last long, though. The thought of not writing for any length of time makes me itch inside. I'm already starting to have some interesting thoughts about the last part of the story, and although I have everything already mapped out in my outline, I've discovered that unexpected things happen as the story progresses, stuff that never went into the original plan. That's one of the things I love about writing. It really is a process of discovery, as well as one of creation. And it. Is. FUN!

Here's a peek at the cover art in progress. Just a few more days, folks...