It’s done!

I’m very happy to report that ‘Rocky Mountain Retribution’, the second volume in the Ames Archives and sequel to my first Western novel, ‘Brings The Lightning‘, has been submitted to my publishers, Castalia House, for editing.  I finished it on Sunday, as promised. I spent yesterday and early this morning doing a quick read-through and edit, to catch the most egregious problems, and writing an Author’s Note (as I did in the first volume) to explain some of the historical quirks that I mention in the text.

The manuscript will now go to several alpha readers here in the USA, while Castalia is editing it from their side.  I’ll do a ‘binge edit’ as soon as all the responses are in, probably in late March or early April, and I hope the book will be published in e-book format by early May.  Print and audio editions will follow as soon as Castalia can produce them.

It’s been a lot of fun writing this book.  It incorporates trips to Colorado and New Mexico, a lot of research in history books and contemporary accounts of the Old West in those states, and a great deal of hard work.  I’m looking forward to seeing and hearing your reaction to it in due course.

I’ve now got a couple of weeks’ hard work scheduled around the house (my wife has a long ‘Honey Do’ list waiting for me!), as well as administrative work like preparing for tax day in April.  After that, it’s hi-ho for my first fantasy novel, which you chose last year. It’s already close to half-written, so I hope to have it ready for publication in May as well.  It’ll be fun to launch two books in the same month!

Peter

9 comments

  1. I have some friends who are published authors. Before anyone complains about publication taking three whole months, let me assure you that a three month turnaround is screaming fast for a novel to go from release to publisher to publication.

    The publisher has to be doing a very fast job for this. But this kind of speed primarily means the author writes a very clean finished draft that needs very little work.

    Very nice.

  2. Congrats!

    Let me share my insights into town placement in the West. This is from living in Arizona a while back, but it may hold true for a wider area.

    There are many very small towns scattered about the desert southwest. Why are these towns located where they are? Their locations seldom make any obvious sense. There may have once been silver or gold deposits, or a stream may once have flowed through the area.

    My firm belief is that that most of those towns were founded at those sites simply because – that's where the mule died.

  3. At first I read that as "Rocky Mountain Redistribution" and feared you'd gone over to the Left. Then sanity prevailed and read it again. Congrats. I look forward to reading it when it comes out.

  4. Congrats! I look forward to reading it (still haven't gotten around to reading the first one I got at Christmas, dang it there's only 24 hours in a day).

    I must say though, that when I saw your headline the first thing I thought of was Jesus on the cross and "It is finished." I was wondering who died.

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