Finally knuckling down and working on editing Black Dogs 2. (See, I told you it existed!)

It’s hard.

Editing something I wrote two months ago is hard enough–editing something I wrote an entire DECADE ago is seriously brutal. My younger self had no sense of humor and seemed to think that you could solve all ills by throwing enough commas and adjectives at it. (Okay, it’s probably not that bad, it just seems that way because I’m hip-deep in it.)

I’m not sure why it seems harder than editing Book 1 back in 2006. Possibly I am a far different (and I hope, better!) writer now, certainly I am a far different person. Possibly Book 1 was simply more tightly plotted, possibly…I don’t know. Black Dogs was the first novel I ever wrote, and enough people have told me that they really enjoyed it–and my publisher has faith in it!–so I will keep slogging through the edits. But standing here on the other side of…lord, most of Digger* and four Dragonbreath manuscripts and a couple of novels in various stages of not-done-ness, it’s very strange to look down on Black Dogs 2 and have to drag my mind back to these people and this world and these things I thought I understood at twenty-one, some of which I was even right about, which is scary in its own way.

I have learned a lot about writing since then, and they aren’t things I can fix in this manuscript without rewriting it from the ground up, which isn’t in the cards, and which wouldn’t work anyway, because this is a book for the people who liked Black Dogs 1 and want the rest of the story.

Well, It is a flawed and awkward and earnest work in many regards, but there are people that want to read it. And probably some day I will say the same about Dragonbreath and Digger and Nurk and all the rest of my works that I am so proud of today, and probably I’ll be seventy and have written a dozen books and people will bring me Black Dogs to sign and I will apologize to them profusely for the adjectives and be immensely flattered that they liked it.

And none of this is getting more stuff edited. Back to work!

*Which no one on earth will ever call "tightly plotted."