Last night at about 11:30, I wrapped up the latest draft of Book 2 of Oathbreaker. It’s called “The Magus’s Tale”. The draft is back to my wonderful editor, Ray Vallese, and hopefully he’ll just catch a spelling error here and there and otherwise declare it ready for publication. This is not to say that I hope he lives by the hack editor rule of the three checks (spell check, grammar check, pay check!), but rather that I hope the book’s good enough to roll out.
The first book in the series clocked in at about 41K words. This next one, pre-edit, is about 55K, or about 35% longer. Of course, Ray might have some ideas like, “This new material you added is terrible.” I don’t think he will, but the mind of the editor is inscrutable or perhaps ineffable.
The preliminary version of the cover, again by Stone Perales, is stunning. He’s done a great job at capturing exactly what I asked for and then some, drawing out the anguish and the joy of the titular character (I just wanted an excuse to say “titular”). The finished version should be something to behold, and I plan to behold it for a while.
Here is my pithy and insightful closing thought: “Anything that can help you wake up has Buddha nature. When I am alone and a bird calls me, I return to myself, I breathe, and I smile, and sometimes it calls me once more. I smile and I say to the bird, ‘I hear already.'” (Being Peace, Thich Nhat Hanh)
