Time to play The Fool.

I'm in that spot where I finished a big project, Elegant Freefall,  and I'm wondering what to work on now. How did I know I was done with the book? When I turned my laptop off yesterday and pulled up the 50000th Kindle version on my tablet and saw a random period. I ran to my laptop, booted it up, and went to open the file in Scrivener. 

Before the laptop was fully booted, I picked up my Fire and wiped the screen. My errant period was a fleck of something. 

So, it was time to stop. After 1,239 edits and 155 proofreading changes (including three OKs that should have been "okay" in dialogue--change made yesterday before the fleck incident) I finally said enough. 

This morning's listen during my walk was the "When is the book done?" episode of the Story Grid Podcast.  It was great timing, and I recommend a listen. I'm extra fragile right now, as I always am after a project draws to a close. But, I've got eleven days (before release) to get into the mindset of The (accepting) Fool.

And, even though I say I don't know what I'm writing next, I do. I have a couple of calls for submission I'm writing toward. As much as I'm ready to not read Elegant Freefall again, I realize that the book has become comfortable. I know the plot line, I know the moments that still make me nod or smile. I know the sentences that I refused to cut the first five read throughs that wound up in my "trash" folder in Scrivener and I know how many adverbs were cut, how many dialogue tags added.

I've got a preorder page up (see link in the navigation menu) for signed paperbacks.  My "forthcoming" release is listed at Women & Words.  It's time to move on!

In other news, I've been fascinated by the idea of Open Access academic work, so as a side project I'm going to be revising the dissertation (17 years later) into book format and updating it. I'll probably chart my progress here in some way.

Finally, I'm trying to decide if I'm doing NanoWriMo this year. I never win, but I usually get about 20K words into a project that later gets revised and mined for another project. And, while I think I should always be in writing mode (so every day is a Nano day), I also know that the deadline aspect works for me.  Anyone else trying for Nano this year?