Escape from the Abyss series

I have a tentative book cover for book 2, Secrets of the Tome. I’m still trying to get used to this one. Book covers are like hats. You have to put one on and look in the mirror. Sometimes, it just says: “YES!” Other times, it has to grow on ya. I’m stilling with the astronaut theme, and I might adjust the color to tune out the gray and make it bluer like the first book. Anyway, here’s a sample:

I’m also up to 98k words. Today was supposed to be the day I targeted 120k words, but I ended up starting my edits earlier in the week, which is progressing rather well. I suspect the story will come in just over 100k, maybe 110k. There is still quite a bit of work to do. I’m currently working on two scenes that will bridge a gap that I had in part of the story. The new scenes are working really well. It took me a couple of days of throwing ideas against the wall to see what I could do. The original flow of the story didn’t make sense. All I could think of was: “Why would anyone do that?” So I changed what someone did and made a really good reason for it. Oh, and it’s got a lot of nail-biting action.

The good news is that I have a bank holiday on Monday that I’ve already marked off as a writing day. That’ll be a day that I devote strictly to my story. Holidays are like a weekend day, except I get up at my normal workday hours, start writing at 8 am and work until around 6ish. That’s how I do those 12k in one-day rough drafts, though this time, I won’t be working on a rough draft. I’ll be editing.

I’m getting anxious to get this book out the door and start book 3. There’s still a lot of stuff to do before I can wrap this one up. I’ll try to create a blog post more often as I get near the final editing. I’m still shooting for the first week of July.