Weekend

 Ah, Saturday.

All I have to do is finish re-writes on Part II of A Fox's Wedding so I can move on to the third half of the story. Start collecting rent checks. Do laundry and a bit of room cleaning. Wait for the developmental editor I found on Fiver to get back to me. Purchase the stock for my revised covers. Finish watching Attack the Block*. And write a review of a book on Greek Mythology.

My other Fiver hire agreed with my reasoning on the new covers, and when I bring out Wedding I intend to have the new branded covers on all three books. And I'm sending them all to her for final tweaking.

I may send chapters from Wedding to a developmental editor as well. Getting a full line edit, though, is expensive even on Fiver. Four hundred bucks barely gets you in the door. (I've also been reading some critical reviews on Grammerly and it is good my instincts had already told me to stay far away from that software.)

At least I've finally accepted the directions the story is going. I just read back through my development file on Wedding and I'm okay with not going in some of the directions I was thinking of when I started. I'd still love to stick some high-speed vehicle stuff in there, especially something sexier than a car, but I may have to settle for my misplaced Nara snowmobile and the "Neintendo" Mario Karts through Tokyo.

Plus I still have to write the romance, particularly the "Casino Royale" black-tie affair on Christmas Day, with all the little black dress and coaching in the earbud and so on.

I'm hoping that for Sometimes a Fox I can change my process enough so I can write the story before I have so many ideas I can't fit them all in. I do have one possible advantage; I know damn little about Paris or France (despite being in the former for a couple of weeks). There's no risk of me putting a French lesson in, for instance.

But you know? I was thinking about it earlier this week and I could pretty much sit down and start writing The Tiki Stars right now. I think I've solved all the essential meta-fictional issues I was wrestling with and with that out of the way it is a used-furniture, trope-happy universe of all the stuff I enjoyed as a kid (and continue to enjoy uncritically).

Well, maybe my Fiver will tell me to drop the Athena Fox series now instead of continuing on through the next two books. Then I can sit down and write something else.

***

*Attack the Block finally came around on the "free to stream" rotation on Amazon Prime. It was on my research list for Fox and Hounds. The very first scene opens with Jodie Wittaker (!) exiting the Oval tube station. It is all in South London street dialect, many of the lines written by real kids. But just as well; I never ended up with any of the Post Codes or other gang activity in the book.

(The Greek Mythology book isn't because I need to bone up on that, too. It is because I need to earn more points at Pubby so I can get some reviews for Wedding when it comes out.)