12 to Midnight

To officially confirm the news that broke last night on Facebook, the revisions to Degrees of Horror are done and the new manuscript has been sent to Pinnacle.

The last couple of weeks have been a pretty exhausting push, to be honest. I looked at what was left and figured I could wrap it up over Thanksgiving weekend and be done in time to read the new Dresden Files book that came out Tuesday. That would be a celebration of it’s own, since I’ve hardly watched TV or read a book in more than a month. I wanted to be able to read Cold Days without feeling guilty about leaving work unfinished. Anyhow, I tried really, really hard, but I didn’t finish over Thanksgiving. It took Monday night, Tuesday morning before work, and Tuesday night to give it the finishing touches. I sent the manuscript to Pinnacle, another copy to Ed, and fired up my e-book reader to buy Cold Days.

So about the book. Here’s the part where I give its long and tortured history. Ed says we rewrote it three times. More accurately we wrote it (the earliest file I can find is from 2006 and we playtested it at Origins 2007), then both of us proofread the entire document and made a bunch of revisions. Then we went through it a second time, approving the Track Changes and making new changes in the process. It doesn’t sound like much, but for a document the size of a novel it’s a long and incredibly exhausting process. After all that, we turned it into Pinnacle. Then we got our editor’s notes back and had to go through the whole thing yet again. By this point Ed and I had lost our steam. Day jobs, family, church, volunteering…we just didn’t have much energy left to put into revisions. It became more and more difficult to find time to collaborate and make game design decisions, leaving a lot of small things unresolved. But two years later here we are.

So what’s next? For a while, nothing much. Pinnacle has other titles in the queue, so I can’t predict when they’ll get to Degrees of Horror and that’s totally okay. They waited patiently for us; we’ll do the same. In the meantime Ed and I have already been talking in general terms about writing new Pinebox fiction. We both thoroughly enjoyed writing for Buried Tales and want to explore more of Pinebox through fiction.

In the meantime, I have some reading to catch up on.