Do I Get Extra Credit For This?

If you're keeping track, you'll notice this blog post is a couple days late. Considering the lack of outcry, I don't think anybody is paying attention that closely. However, I intend to keep up my weekly blog posting, and I did not want to miss my Friday post deadline. It happened, however, because I've been busy. Oh, sure, everyone is busy these days. I'm usually always busy. But this time I was extra busy. With what, you might ask? Well, helping another author prepare her novel for publishing, for one thing. But since this is my "writing news" blog, I'm happy to announce some news! Another thing that has kept me busy is a new novel: Extra Credit: Loyalty! As you might guess or already know, it is the sequel to Lesson One: Revolution! Although the sequel is not yet ready to be published, I've reached some important milestones recently, but only by staying busy and, unfortunately, letting a few things slide.

As I mentioned in April, I gave myself a goal to have the first draft of the sequel done before summer. As I announced first to my newsletter subscribers a week ago, I achieved that goal by reaching the end of the first draft earlier this month. I jumped right in and started editing the novel, and now I have come to a good stopping point on the second draft. That takes me to my next milestone: I am now letting people read the story. I wrote the novel using Markdown, so I ran the Markdown files through pandoc to generate an ODT file. From that file I exported a copy to PDF and then did a "save as" to a Word DOC file. These three files were compressed into a ZIP, which I've now started sending to my beta readers.

This isn't the shortest blog post ever, but I'm going to wrap it up here because... yep, because I'm busy. :D If you'd like to be a beta reader, please contact me and let me know your email address.