All right, enough fooling around. The line must be drawn somewhere. It's time to get serious. Seriously serious.

The problem, of course, is that I have that most coveted and dreaded of blessed afflictions, the Full-Time Real Job. The problem is the solution. The solution is the problem. Never before so desired and despised, so cherished and detested, so central to the Grand Plan and yet at once detrimental to it has a thing been. Double-edged, this sword is. Inverted, these sentences are. Awkwardly stilted, this blog has become.

The point is that people have been giving me shit—and rightfully so—for taking so long to finish the third book in the series.

Hate's Profiting has been mostly finished for a long time. Novelists will recognize the problematic phrase “mostly finished” as the state a manuscript occupies for most of its life:

Stage 1- The Idea
(Of all the notions for stories you have swirling around in your head all the time, you select the one premise that just won't leave you alone.)

Stage 2 - The Outline
(You transform this idea into the framework of a plot.)

Stage 3 - The Real Work
(You pummel, thrash, stack, shovel, and stitch together several hundred pages based on the outline from Stage 2.)

Stage 4 - Finishing
(This part usually takes 80% or more of the total amount of time from conception to publication, and has no clear end.)

Here's the trouble. You're never really finished.

You. Are. Never. Finished. No matter how many times you re-read, revisit, revise, review and revamp your project, you will always find one more thing to fix or adjust. It's a process that has no satisfying termination.

. . . But that's not my excuse. I have no excuse. I just need to prioritize. This third and final book in the VdV trilogy has been sitting here in front of me like a neglected science fair stand-up pasteboard tri-fold for far too long.

SO, this is my resolution: I am finishing Hate's Profiting in September.

There, I said it. I have created an aggressive daily writing schedule for myself, and I intend to stick to it. This whole, “when I get around to it” strategy has obviously not been effective.

Then, in October, I am going to go back to DTfG and CC, and put in a couple of minor but long-overdue repairs that have been nagging at me for months.

The fully completed trilogy, including Volume III, will be released/re-released in November.

I'm counting on you all to keep me honest here.



My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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