A Long Absence

I've been on sabbatical the last few weeks. By "sabbatical" I mean that every time I should have written a blog, I went and did something else instead. Usually, that something else was reading. I've gone through a number of books lately:

The Crippled God - Steven Erikson
Making Money - Terry Pratchett
Thud! - Terry Pratchett
Unseen Academicals - Terry Pratchett
Medicus: A Novel of the Roman Empire - Ruth Downie
Westmark - Lloyd Alexander

As you can see, I've been on kind of a Terry Pratchett kick lately. I think I'd have read more if my local library had a better selection. It's hard to read one and not want to go right back into that world. I've been trying--unsuccessfully--to get my wife to start reading them.

New on the book: I had a long talk with my agent recently. I'm now working on a rewrite of about 40K words of Promise of Blood. Not exactly what I wanted to do, but I couldn't argue with many of the problems she had and the solution is a rewrite. The good news is, I'm excited about my plans for the re-write and I'm already about 15K words into it. It will make the first third of the book move faster and, hopefully, pull the reader in far better than the first draft would have.

On the thought of agents, I read a blog recently that talked about how agents are faring in all of this hubbub in the publishing world. I thought it was of particular interest because most news I see has to do with authors or editors, not the middleman.