I have completed the first draft of my newest novel and this week I will be sending it out to the brave souls that have volunteered as tributes – ah hem I mean beta readers.

This Sf mystery novel has clocked in at 103,000 words making it about 25% larger than my SF/Noir novel Vulcan’s Forge, but still a little bit on the smallish side for a lot of sf novels. As I have posted about before I tend to write lean.

I’m happy with the draft and I think I did a decent job, but these sort of warm good feelings about a work have been wrong before and the feedback from the beta readers will be a critical step in the book’s progress.

What is unquestioned is that I have earned a little break from the nocturnal writing and can be lazy with my Xbox and numerous streaming services for at least a few weeks.