Here it is, May of 2020, and I'm getting closer and closer by the week. Or at least I thought I was, up until a few days ago. What I have realized is that the story simply needs more work. More polishing, more characterization, more description, and even a little more plotting.
It's a pretty good book, in my opinion. But it can be better, and I think that my readers deserve better. If I can't improve on the first book, if I can't improve my own writing ability, why bother going to all this effort?
I am a big fan of the statement, "Perfect is the enemy of good." I have followed this philosophy professionally for a number of years, and it has helped me to realize that my internal perfectionism only slows me down and prevents me from completing projects on time because I am always polishing this little bit or fixing that little bit, and never saying "This is good enough, it meets requirements, let's get it out the door." The Hand of Tyr took me almost ten years to finish, in large part because I kept going back and re-writing things over and over.
So I know a little bit about perfectionism, and about procrastination, and about perfect being the enemy of good.
But with that in mind, I do believe that this second book needs more work, and needs to be improved, before I call it done. My deadline is only going to slip by a few months (probably toward the end of the year), so this is something that many people might not even notice, or might not have noticed, except for the fact that I am writing this blog post.
Hope y'all are having a good pandemic here in 2020. Mine has been mostly quiet, working from home and rarely going out. Hopefully by the time I get this book out the door, we will have largely returned to something resembling normal life. I guess only time will tell.
