Great News, Even Better News, and Bad News for The Broken Jack

Here's a quick status update for The Broken Jack. I have great news, even better news, and bad news.

First, the great news: after more years idle than I'd like to admit, and more years in production than I can believe, The Broken Jack is finally through major edits. That is, it has finally reached a point where it can be printed out, and read, and (theoretically, anyway) enjoyed, without any notes of "FIXME: This" or "CHECK: That". Wow!

And the even better news is that it seems to be a good book. At least, I like it a lot. For a lot of years, I thought of this book as disposable, one that I should write just to be done with, for experience, not because it was worthwhile. The result has been different from what I expected, though. It has turned out really good: the characters are fun and the conflict is interesting and everything gets worse every day. Opinions will vary, of course, but I think this might be my best book so far, and I didn't see that coming.

And that, actually, is also the bad news. Once, my plan was to burn through the book just to get it out of the way and be done with it. Now that it seems good to me, it matters, and I want it to be as good as possible. So, although the major edits are complete, I'm going through the manuscript with a red pen again, and I'm not hesitating to make changes that I think are improvements. And so far, I'm marking up every page.

So, that's where we are. On the bright side, the major edits are done, and it seems to be very good. On the dark side, it seems to be very good, so it behooves me to make it the best that it can be. It will still be done, and done soon. But it was supposed to be done already. Actually, it was supposed to be done already, but not very good, and instead it seems very good, but still needs work. I'll take that trade any day.