Barring the unforeseen — which is always sort of risky, but we can assume — A Gift of Thought should have no problem making my mental June 12th publication date.

I suppose I’m nervous about that barring the unforeseen, now. I’m still in the midst of edits and revisions, but I’m having fun with them. I spent a while today giving Dillon a little more attitude in one chapter. I might even have gone so far as to give him an eye roll. By the time I was done, I was more charmed by him than ever and that’s saying a lot, because I love Dillon.

Apart from the people who read it on fictionpress, another ten people are reading it now. Based on past experience, I might get feedback from three or four, five at most. I’ll go with whatever I have by next Tuesday, but I’ve made some terrific changes already, so I’m definitely not feeling as if I need to wait for reader commentary to publish.

Good thing, too. I glanced at my traffic stats on fictionpress today (as I took the story down) and over 630 people had supposedly read the last chapter. Exactly three had bothered to take the time to say something nice. Three. I’d figure that if you made the effort to go to the last chapter, you probably read the preceding 80,000 words so the fact that 627 people had spent hours reading but didn’t care enough even to say ‘thanks for the free read’ was…disheartening, I guess.

Writing is fun, but before I started putting the words on paper, I was perfectly happy making up the stories in my head and it was a whole lot easier. The only reason for me to put the words on paper is to share them with other people, and the only reason to share them is if other people enjoy them. It’s tough not to view silence as apathy.

Ah, well. Maybe Natalya’s story will just live in my head for a while.