Reader draft of Housesitting... now sent

I just pushed 'send' on an email sending what I'm calling the 'reader draft' of Housesitting to a select number of people. If you didn't get a copy please don't be offended (or ask for one)!

This is a very important step to publication. I finally got the book to where I wanted it this week (thanks to a long plane ride and a dark corner to write it!). It turned out I rewrote and added to a number of scenes throughout the book, got a few continuity details ironed out and, I hope, brought the overall quality upwards. With the gestation of this thing taking roughly 5 years it's unsurprising that a lot of the changes happened near the beginning of the book, but I think now the characters at the beginning match the characters at the end.

While there may still be some revisions and rewriting - there's a couple of scenes I'm looking at to potentially cut entirely - the current word count is a shade over 130,000 words, which is crazy long, really. I've got more thoughts on this and will probably bore you on it later, but suffice to say, the 'shape' of a book like this is a bit wacky... longer in places than any normal book would be, and when you combine that with my plot... well it gets long.

We'll see what my readers think. And once they express an opinion, the hopefully short ride to publication begins....