News: Making Progress

9/26/15

• There's two fun announcements I have to mention first.  The Oracle's Sprite is up for giveaway in a bunch of different places: HeartsonFire, LT3, and I are all offering one copy to a lucky commenter.  Make sure to sign up for my giveaway today: http://melleightsblog...giveaway-the-oracles-sprite   Sprite comes out very soon on September 30th.
  
  
• I also have a tentative release date for Dragon Deception: February 10, 2016.  The story is finished with the editing process--unless the copy editor sees something--which means that date should be accurate. 
  
  
• On to the progress I've made over the last week.  Both Dragon Consultant and Dragon Deception are back with LT3 after I finished with their edits.  I made a mental health decision to hold off returning to the edits for The Case of the Wandering Wolves for a few short days; too much editing at one time fries my brain.  Instead I decided to work on one of my stories.  For some reason, Dragon Spy jumped to the front.  I know, I haven't finished writing Dragon Soldier, the previous book in the series, but I figured out the main plot line for Spy and wanted to start working on it.  It looks like Spy will be the sixth book in the series.  I'm not entirely certain I'm happy about that because there is a large time jump between book five and book six, but at the same time I think that's how the story needs to flow.  Soldier is the end of arc one, Spy is the start of arc two.  Squeezing a book in between there to try to soften the sudden jump feels awkward right now.  Of course, given the way this series has a habit of suddenly tossing new ideas my way it might be premature to state that. 
  
  
• After I wrote about 3k words in Dragon Spy I returned to working on the The Case of the Wandering Wolves.  The beta readers didn't hold back their punches, which is wonderful, but it means there is a ton of work that I have to get done.  I'm honestly only ten pages in and that's without major procrastination distracting me.  There is so much to fix, most of it requiring rewriting, and it's unbelievably time consuming.  I'm going to keep plodding along and hope I'm able to finish on time. 
  
  
• I have also been working on Justified.  This story is very convoluted.  I'm just over 20k words in and I haven't even gotten to the main plot.  I've given plenty of clues, of course, but I don't want to give anything away just yet.  I want to finish writing the build up soon so I can really get into the fun bits.