One of my favorite writing quotes is by Sinclair Lewis and it states, "Writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair." There have been many variations of this theme in quotes, but mainly it comes to this: if you want to be good at something, you have to put in the time to make it happen, whether you are talking about writing, or playing the piano, or lifting weights, or making the best chocolate chip banana nut muffins in the world. (Still haven't got that one down yet...) I know everyone is wondering where AFTERSHOCK is and when it's coming out. Right now it's in the "big edit" stage. That's when you knock off all the really ugly parts and try to find the diamond buried in all the rocks. The big edit stage is the hardest edit because you're moving around story lines and plots and changing characters and fixing timing...and where that gets hard is that anything you change affects other parts of the story, so you have to follow all the trails back to everything that one change related to and change that, too. It's a long process, but really exciting when you start to see the cleaned up version starting to shine through. So, I'm studiously applying Lewis's recipe for success and working through this big edit. Stay tuned for more info on the launch date!