Just a quick note because I’m excited to say that I finished the first draft of my third novel late last night. The Twiller is a departure from the Right Ascension series (my first two novels); it is a much lighter read, a comedic romp through the galaxy with a hapless hero and his strange marshmallow-shaped twiller friend. It is funny, or at least meant to be, without the serious ethical undertones of my first two novels. I do manage to include some social commentary beneath all the jokes, as our hero visits faraway planets with names like El Leigh, Bez Erkeley, York, WMD, Fleur Ida, and Huh, Why E? And I just might make fun of things like traffic, airport security, law firms, and some other things I’ve had experience with in real life. And, fine, truth be told, you may even notice some friends from my personal life making guest appearances.

Anyway, I’m very excited about this book, as I think it will appeal easily to non-science-fiction fans. It’s a little shorter than my first two books, and it’s a more light, fun, casual read. And, hey, who doesn’t like to laugh?

The only thing tempering my excitement for being “done” is that I still have a few other things to do before the book is ready:

• Go back through and flesh out a couple of scenes and fix a few things.
• Start from the beginning and make several passes through with a fine-toothed comb, editing the heck out of it and trying to eradicate all typos.
• Bug my three noble editors for their help in editing the thing.
• Design a cover. This part scares me, since I have no artistic ability whatsoever and need to find a way to draw/design the twiller. Any artists out there?
• Write the back cover blurb.
• Do the interior design and formatting — things like page size, headers, chapter titles, paragraph spacing, indents, ellipse dots, em dashes, etc.
• Write the “front matter,” including the flyleaf page, some quotes for the front, copyright page, dedication, etc.
• Create the “back matter,” including the about the author page and pic.
• Figure out what to do with the footnotes, since e-books don’t handle them very well.
• Format it for print and the various types of e-books out there (which involves converting it to HTML, adding tables of contents, etc.).
• Upload it to various channels like Amazon and CreateSpace and create the description and categories.
• Put it up on my own website and create new purchasing buttons through PayPal.
• Promote it like heck, try to get reviews, and hope someone wants to buy the thing.

So, there’s quite a ways still to go. But I hope to have it all done within a couple of months. Until then, check out the Twiller page here for excerpts and updates and to leave a comment if you’d like to be notified when it’s completely finished and ready to go!