I'm back in London for the next six months, which means I"ll be -- and indeed have been -- posting to my "a Yank abroad" blog, 1001teatimes.blogspot.com/, The Book of a Thousand and One Teatimes (gratitude to John Barth for accidentally providing the title). The most recent post tells of my six hours as a guest of Her Majesty's Immigrations officers. Good fun.

I recently spent three weeks in the U.K. -- a trip planned around attending the World Science Fiction Convention, which was held in Glasgow this year. As an editor and publisher I like to keep in touch with our British authors and our British market, both of which groups we're doing our best to increase. As a writer I planned to meet up with my agent, who's headquartered in London, and hand off a disk containing my latest novel.

This is a book that took me entirely too long to write, because I let other things come first. Well, often we have to do that, but we should never let it become an excuse for not writing at all. When I was able to put my writing first at least in terms of the clock -- get up, meditate, drink tea, write, THEN do everything else -- I was able to type "The End" about a week before I flew out, leaving the last week for all the little details around publishing issue Four of Aeon Speculative Fiction, which details I finished up mere minutes before the arrival of the airport shuttle.

So I handed the novel over with much relief and happiness, and we discussed which editors in England and the U.S. might get the first looks at it. One editor my agent suggested I voted against, always deferring, of course, to his expertise in these matters. When she edited a good friend of mine she never made substantive changes in his work, though they were needed. When he got a new publisher and a new editor his work improved at least 50% in sheer readability, and this can only be good news for his career, not to mention his artistic self-esteem. When my agent heard this story he said, "Hmmm. Not her, then."

So now I'm plotting the next thing, which might be more than one thing, and trying to find where the real story is. Some writers do that discovery process best as they write, often throwing out reams of unneeded first draft once they finally find the core of the work. I do it by creating a detailed synopsis that's subject to radical change as time goes by, discussing plot points and storyline development and character motivation with myself until I arrive at something I feel is ready to write. Then I try to keep the synopsis updated with changes that get made to the actual book as I write. I suppose I spend the same amount of time doing this as other writers spend writing the story and then taking out the extraneous bits, but somehow it suits me better.

More news on that front as it breaks.