Writing update: Servant proofs & cover, Curse battle finished, events

Two bits of news about Servant of a Dark God. I received the proofs for the paperback version in the mail this week as you see below. The cat is used because he deserves a cameo. This is Panther giving us either his “Sigh, whatever, I’ll submit to your weird human ways” or “Umm, scratches” looks. He’s the last of the original eleven cats we inherited when we moved to Laketown back in 2003 (nine of them were black, one was a gray tabby, another a sort of tortoise color). Dutchess, the one who liked to tear open our bread bags while we weren’t looking and eat the bread, got run over. Three others, including our talker Tabby, we think were stolen by a woman looking for “stray” cats because, golly, the rattlers keep getting all hers. Ours were obviously strays because we live in 2.5 acres surrounds by dozens and dozens of acres of open land around us and we let them roam the hills! A few were shot, we think, by a kid who came to visit his grandfather who lived 1/2 a mile down the road. We think coyotes might have gotten the rest. So Panther is the last survivor. 7 years old. We love the old man.

I have just a few days to go through the proofs and find any typos and punctuation errors and get it back. The paperback version is scheduled right now to be released in November. And here’s the cover the publisher is using on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. You can see the difference between it and the hardcover by comparing it to the image in the sidebar.

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As for Curse of a Dark God, I typed the last word of the final battle and climax on Saturday. As it now stands, the final battle required 34,429 words to write. Holy schnitzel! Again, many adult novels average around 90,000 – 110,000 words total. So this is a significant sequence. For those of you who like to think in pages, it’s going to be anywhere from 100 – 140 pages depending on how the publisher configures the book. I have one more short chapter to write and the draft is finished. Well, I have a few things to seed into earlier chapters so that the ending etc. works, but that’s small stuff. The next step is to have a few readers go through this draft. Make any necessary edits. Then get it out to my agent as quickly as possible. Once my editor accepts it, we’ll be able to set a release date. And I might feel the sword of editoral doom lift just a little from my head.

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Finally, just wanted to give folks a heads up about the following events I’ve committed to.