Well, not exactly. I have finally finished a complete first draft of The Daylight War, book 3 of 5 in the Demon Cycle, and handed it in to my agent and editors in the US & UK. Before this point, no complete version of the book existed. It was a combination of prose, stepsheet, and some abracadabra locked in the recesses of my brain. The first draft came in at a whopping 243,000 words, just slightly longer than Desert Spear.

More importantly, I am very, very proud of it.

I was really worried I was going to miss my April 30 deadline for the book, as I have missed them before, but the looming threat of the due date really helped me rally into some of the best writing I have ever done. Normally a decent writing week for me was 5,000 words. 7,000 was a really good week. For the last month, I have been exceeding 10,000 words a week, with this past week being my personal best at over 16,000. It was been amazing, fulfilling, and utterly exhausting, both mentally and physically.

And I absolutely could not have done it without the incredible support of my friends and family, as well as all my readers who have shown their support on here on the blog, on twitter, facebook, and G+, as well as in person at conventions and the like. I cannot possibly tell you how much that has meant to me while working on a project that has taken over two years during a very difficult time in my life. So thank you, everyone.

There is still a LOT of work to be done. My editors and agent will read it and send me comments. I will prepare NDA’s for my beta-readers, and they will read it and send me comments. I will read it through myself, and make my own comments. Then I will do a rewrite where I cherry pick all the comments and edits I agree with (because I can guarantee there will be conflicts between all those people) and do a rewrite to incorporate them. This will be the second draft.

Then I will do another rewrite, privately, where I line edit and wordsmith every sentence, every word, every piece of punctuation and formatting.

After that I will submit this third draft, which will be sent to a copyeditor, after which there will be another rewrite, albeit a lesser and more line-edit targeted one.

The resulting fourth draft—probably in late summer/early fall—will go to translators worldwide, as well as the production departments of my English publishers, who will put it into layout and through a proofreader. Then I will edit the page proofs for last minute corrections/changes.

While this is going on, I will be drawing the new character avatar for Inevera, discussing cover art and design with the publishers, working on marketing, etc. I will also be finalizing the outline for the next book, now tentatively titled The Skull Throne, and sending that in so I can begin prose on that book once the second draft of The Daylight War is locked in.

Right now, The Daylight War is scheduled for worldwide release on Feb. 4, 2013, right before my 40th birthday. I am pretty damn psyched about that. It will follow the January 2013 UK print release of The Great Bazaar & Brayan’s Gold, which I know a lot of folks out there have been waiting for.

In the meantime, I have a couple of weeks off while everyone reads the manuscript. This is good, because I need a bit of time to rest, recharge, and absorb some of the creativity of others. I have a huge stack of books in my to-be-read pile, and haven’t been to a movie theater in I don’t know how long.

But I won’t be totally idle, either. I had a great idea to continue my Red Sonja Blue series with Dynamite Comics, and have three books left in that contract. I will also be finishing up the Demon Cycle short story Mudboy, which will appear in Shawn Speakman’s Unfettered Anthology. An extended, novella-length version will eventually come out from Subterranean Press to go along with the beautiful limited edition hardcovers they have made of The Great Bazaar and Brayan’s Gold.

But for now:

