I hadn't planned on reading the sequel to The Course of Empire so soon, but my partner decided she did and went and bought a secondhand hardback from Amazon, so how could I resist?
The story starts two years after the end of the end of the previous book and introduces a fourth race to the Jaoverse. If you want a synopsis then I recommend reading Amazon or Goodreads. The plot has enough shenanigans going on to keep the reader engaged, but what I liked most was the alien culture building. I was sucked into the world and society of the Lleix, so much so that when we start to see them through the eyes of the Humans and Jao it's quite a shock.
On other matters, I've been busy writing for the Galactic Journey blog, which takes a lot of time because I have to research everything to make sure it's not anachronistic. For example, making sure I didn't use the phrase male gaze, which was not coined until 1975. Still, I like a challenge, and it makes a change to write outside of my usual areas of interest.
On my own writing, well that's been interesting.
Currently, I'm working through another edit of Strike Dog, folding in my Beta reader's criticisms and suggestions, and I'm up to chapter five, which is 13,597 in out of a total of 95,768 words. So a start, but what this doesn't tell you is that chapter four has yet to be written. Though I have 6,682 words from an earlier draft cut and pasted into my novel, it requires a drastic rewrite, because the reason those words were cut in the first place was because they were a dreadful info dump.
In the meantime, my beloved is re-reading Ghost Dog, but before she started, she decided to re-read Bad Dog. Guess what? She found some typos. Only four, which to be fair isn't many, but still a shock for me, and I imagine that given another set of eyes or a longish break, more could be found. However, they were mostly trivial things like an extra and an the, but there was one character name error, and a line that needed revising to reflect changes made in an earlier edit of the novel that I missed.
Cést la vie. Gnashing of teeth. Until next week, take care.
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