It’s been weeks since I blogged here, but I’ve been blogging every day over at the writing blog I mentioned early in October. I like blogging every day, as it turns out. I’m not sure I should be doing it here, because, wow, spoilers galore when I write about writing, but it has felt healthy for me to post about my successes and failures over there.

And — the news! — I have finally finished the first draft of A Gift of Time. To be absolutely honest, it might suck. After seventeen months, I am apparently way too close to it to tell. So I might never publish it. But I’m looking for a few beta readers who are willing and able to be honest with me.

I’m not going to sell a bad book. Not, obviously, bad in the sense of poorly edited or sloppy, I would never do that. But books can be bad in other ways — flat, lifeless, awkward, unappealing characters, weakly plotted, etc, etc, etc. Writing groups will say, Oh, fix it in editing. And I’m a fan of editing. But I also think that as a writer, I learn more from writing new material than I do from interminable revisions on old material and this book has had a lot of revisions already. I’d rather move on and write something new than spend the next year revising this one.

So I need a few honest readers who will tell me what they think of it. And frankly, they might be the only people who get to see this story. If you would like to be one of them, either leave a comment (with your email address, obviously) or send me an email. I’ll send you a file, in the format of your choice — Word, epub, or Mobi.