On September 28, 2017, MuseItUp publishing sent me a contract for the e-book rights to the Heirs of Mâvarin trilogy. Needless to say, I was thrilled. I had pitched to one of their editors at TusCon in late 2016, and successively submitted a revised pitch with a chapter and synopsis, and, eventually, a whole manuscript of the first book. When I heard back, I had just finished writing the prequel novelette, "The Boy Who Saw," so I was free to hop back on the trilogy for one last round of revisions before sending the three "final" manuscripts. Meanwhile, I submitted the contract and three author info sheets, one for each book.
On September 30, I started having trouble with iPad keyboards, a problem that persisted for several weeks and several keyboards. Ultimately I had to reinstall the iOS on the iPad.
On October 4, I finished my "final" revision of The Tengrem Sword.
On October 7, I consulted with Sara Geer about maps she will be working on for me. This is something she's a thousand times better at than I am.
On October 8, I messed around combining old Sherlock portraits with royalty-free stock photos. Here's what I ended up with:
Del Merden
Crel Merden
Del looks like a beach bum, but that's kind of appropriate.
On October 18, I finished my "final" revision of The Road and the City.
On October 25, I discovered that I hadn't actually written six scenes yet at the end of Castle in the Swamp, back when I was last working on it many months ago. Restructuring the original novel into a trilogy with proper dramatic structure for each book had created two plot complications that still needed to be resolved properly. Bummer.
On November 15, I was down to just one unwritten scene. I celebrated with another composite of Sherlock art and photography to come up with this picture of Shela Cados:
On November 18, I wrote that last scene, bought paper and three binders, and printed out all three novels for a final pre-submission proofread on paper. And there was much rejoicing.
I've now entered my edits from the Book One proofread into the master Word document, performed several global search-and-replace routines on all three books, and started on my Book Two proofread. I hope to get it all off to MuseItUp before the weekend is out. Yay!
"When will the books be out? Can I have an autographed copy?" people keep asking. The contract is for e-books, but I will be arranging for a print-on-demand run in paperback. I'm guessing that the three volumes of Heirs of Mâvarin will be out in the first half of 2018.
K.
