Things are chugging along with the first book. A few people I don’t know have actually picked it up, and that’s a start. I have my first ever review, and it’s about as wonderful of a review as I could ever hope for. It seems to be responsible for the three sales from people that I don’t know (or at least they haven’t told me they know me). I’m excited and gratified by the attention.

I can’t just loll about hoping for more strokes to my ego though, so I’m settling down for a long day of typing/editing/writing. I finished up Chapter 5 of the sequel last night. It’s in desperate need of pruning, but that can wait until I finish entering the rest of the story. Getting distance from it will allow me to make better choices in terms of what to keep, what to eliminate, and what to move.

Chapter 6 will be the focus of today’s work. It’s much shorter than Chapter 5, and tighter written, so it should go much faster. I think I’ll move a scene from a later chapter to it, which will accomplish a couple of things. One, it will bolster the page count of an otherwise too short chapter, and two, it will place a scene earlier in the timeline, which will make a lot more sense in terms of character development. It’s also a less than serious scene and the story could use something to lighten the mood at this point.