I got page proofs for Shapeshifted about a week ago, and honestly, I set them aside. I couldn’t bear doing them and then being finished with Edie’s story so far.

But then I turned in another chunk of Deadshifted in to Daniel, and whoa nelly did it need help. He emailed me and made me give up the end of the story (when I’d been trying to keep it to myself to surprise him), but we both knew I’d gone off the rails. So I wrote a 2k summary of where I wanted the book to go, and then we had a long phone call about what it was going to take to get it there. The 2k summary should have, perhaps, been my first clue, since that was about 50k of book-activities left, and I am over 50k into the book, and I like my books to run around 90k…so not surprisingly I get to do a lot of seam ripping of the last ten k. But, I think I know where things need to go now, which is good — and hopping back — it made doing pageproofs nice. The six month book cycle is awesome, because by the time I get into the “why do I call myself a writer? terrible lies!” funk, I get proof that I am really a writer delivered to me, with all my comma errors gone ;).

I’ve also been punting around some new ideas inside my head. Nothing solid so far, but that’s sort of the nice thing about new ideas, playing around with them.

Been nurse-working a lot it feels like. A lot of my coworkers are out on vacation right now, so I’m trying to help out and pick up extra shifts while the getting’s good — especially because I’m gonna buy prizes for Moonshifted promo soon. I can’t believe that’s swinging into gear here! Holy cow! I’ve requested a week of work off right after it’s release so that I can juggle everything and not be all stressed out, since Nightshifted’s release steamrollered me, and I didn’t have any free time at all due to other obligations in May.

Also been doing a ton of shoulder exercises :P. I went and saw my PT who was all, “Yeah, you’ve messed this up.” The exercises he gave me are helping though and I’m being very responsible with it at work. It already feels a little better, so I’m hoping I can just magically keep things up and it’ll stay in its socket where it’s supposed to be :P.

Anyhow, things are good, just very busy, par for the course. I work six out of the next seven nights, but then I get a four day break to get caught up on things again :D.