The final, final edited copy of the manuscript of the first book in the Crane Moon Cycle, The Phoenix and the Sword, just went off to the book designer for interior formatting. If you don’t know what this is, you and I are in a similar position. Apparently it is a thing that makes a book readable on kindle! Sorry, beta readers who got this in a giant PDF…I did my best. But it will now be better.
This, to be honest, is a strange feeling. This little child of mine is off into the big world. I can’t do anything else to fix it or make it better or different than it is. When I wake up in the middle of the night with a new scene pecking at my heart, it will have to go somewhere else, like a short story or an extra I’ll send out with a newsletter to readers.
Having sent off Aili, Tairei, Zhu Guiren and Tainu’s first adventures to share with a wider world means that I’ll be able to give more attention to the next books in the series — and those stories are also pecking at my heart. Until I write through to the end, and all the characters I love have struggled through to their ultimate desires, I’ll need to keep cultivating writing.
But to remember how it was to first dive into this world, in the next few blog posts I’ll go back to what first drew me to this genre, and how this complicated tale of queer phoenixes and demons got its start, with a vision of a golden hill and a dusty green tree, and a woman saying to the woman she’s been seeking for a thousand years, “Healing and not dying, that’s all I’ve got.”