The Manuscript's In The Mail

Merry Christmas everyone,
I hope all of you are healthy, happy and terrific! I certainly am. I wish you all a cool Yule and a frantic 1st!
As most of you already know, I have been working over my manuscript for "Three Seconds On, Three Seconds Off - Volume 1" since the end of July 2008. I carefully went through the manuscript four complete times, in these past five months, reading (aloud) many hundreds of thousands of words in the process. Whew!!! I felt like I was staring in the movie "Groundhog Day"! It was awesome though, and I'm so very glad I did the four additional edits. It amazed me to realize that I could still find errors - even after working so meticulously to get rid of them. That means only one thing - I really am just human. Oh well, did you expect more???
Anyway, the completed manuscript is now in the able hands of my publisher. Now I wait. The manuscript is expected to go past the eyes of the owner of Writing On Stone Press and then to a final-touch editor before I see it again. I don't expect any changes, but I'll know soon.
While I wait, I have resumed work on "Three Seconds On, Three Seconds Off - Volume 2". It is progressing much faster than Volume 1 did. I suppose that seven years of intense writing have taught me a little.
I have temporarily set my fiction novel aside, but still haven't decided if I will save it for NaNoWriMo 2009 or not. "In Ravenscrag's Shadow" is nearly finished, and I don't know if I can stand a 10-1/2 month wait before I see how it ends. The epic novel is a work of pure fiction, but there is an actual location that provides the setting for the story. I hope to visit that remote location in the summer of 2009. I cannot just go there on my own because the region is the home of grizzly bears. (Bears are intimidated by groups, not by individual humans - and perhaps the term intimidated is a bit too strong.) If I visit the region, as part of a group of five or more, we should not have any trouble, so I have to organize the event before I can be certain of going. Stay tuned.