Just got the notification that print galleys are incoming for Catalyst! One last shot to find and fix mistakes and it’s off to the printers. The paperback should be available mid-January to February, depending on holiday schedules and shipping and so on. I’m so excited, I can’t wait to see it and hold it in my hands. Catalyst was my first book and it took a lot of effort to revise it into shape but I’m glad I did. Holding the actual print book will be a real landmark.

Patrice Michelle asked today, what book are you most proud of and why? For me, in many ways it’s Catalyst. In the act of sitting down, day in and day out, I proved to myself that I could do it. I could actually write and finish a whole book. When I printed it out and saw the stack of paper it was the most astonishing realization; a whole book that didn’t exist before was sitting there! And it came from my head, a page at a time! Really, there is nothing like that. The sense of achievement and wonder and pride.

Unfortunately like most first books Catalyst had a fairly serious flaw and it took some time and some growth as a writer before I understood what was wrong, and then how to fix it, and then I had to sit down and do the work (urgh). I was willing to do the work, though, because no matter how much time passed I still got sucked in every time I sat down to re-read it. I still enjoyed the story, the characters, laughed at all the wisecracks. If I liked it that much, it was worth fixing, and so fix it I did.

And soon it’ll be in my hands, printed and bound, the final end product of all those manuscript pages when I sat down to write a book for the first time. Really looking forward to that moment.