Deborah's Journal

It's book release day! Let's party!


Lots of places to buy it: your local bookstore (yay!), Powells, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.

199,000 and counting...

It's amazing to think I've already trimmed 20,000 words.

I'm past the initial flopping-around figuring-things-out part, so I'm doing more fine tuning and less draconian slashing.

It's been a while since I've posted about my writing progress on the next Darkover novel, a sequel to Stormqueen. I'm currently fine-tuning the penultimate chapter and embarking upon what I presume will be the final one. It's turning out much better than I hoped, but perhaps that it because the "how I feel about the work in progress" swings like a pendulum from "the worst drek ever penned" to "wow, this is really good!"

I should have time to do another pass, making sure that a character who can't knit in chapter 25 isn't teaching someone else in chapter 13. Then it goes off to the MZB Literary Works Trust for approval while I am out of commission during my cataract surgery (one eye, then the other 2 weeks later).

I'm still on track for turning it in to DAW in the fall.

Over on my blog, I'll be posting snippets from the current work in progress, the Darkover novel Thunderlord. Hopefully, I'll get a new one up every Friday.

Here's the skinny:

I've been hard at work on the next Darkover novel, Thunderlord. Marion Zimmer Bradley, who created the world of Darkover, intended to write a companion book to Stormqueen, but died before she could write it. In the few fragmentary notes she left, she indicated only that it would take place a generation after Stormqueen and feature the son of Donal Delleray and Renata Leynier, raised by Lord Aldaran as his son and heir. I submitted a proposal to write this book, and both the MZB Literary Trust and DAW Books approved it. Because readers have waited for Thunderlord for years now and it may be some time before it's published (since it's not finished yet), now and in the following weeks I'll post snippets for your enjoyment. Hopefully, I will find something in each chapter that is neither too confusing nor gives away too much. Please remember that this is a work in progress and drafts have a habit of changing drastically from inception to finished book.