The writing has been hard of late, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel

In no small part because of my wife's recent radiation treatments, all 15 of them spread over three weeks, I've not had a lot of time to write. We've either had to drive for hours each day to get her to a treatment, or we've stayed in hotels near where her treatments are given, and it's not so easy to write in a hotel with another person practically on top of you along with pets.

Then there have been the two major snow and ice storms we've had. Power was out for days and again we spent that time in a hotel more than an hour away from home because all the nearer hotels were booked for a big college basketball game.

So, as I said, writing has not come easy of late.

The good news is I just finished the climax to my latest novel, The Company of Seven. The novel isn't finished, but I'm at 152,000 words in what should be 160,000 once I'm done.

Then I'll set the novel aside for awhile, probably at least a month, before I get into editing it. Somewhere in there I'll send out copies to beta readers and editors. Concerning beta readers, I'm thinking of doing something different this time and opening up to the public, probably through a call-out on Facebook. Normally I have a few readers lined up, but this time I simply wanted to go a different way and see what would happen.

Once the novel is edited, I've got the cover to design and formatting to do for the e-book and the print edition. I've also got a couple of other covers to rework for older, related novels, and some more print formatting to do.

After that, I've a couple of short stories I need to work on for anthologies, and I might considering writing a few other shorts for online sites which have caught my eye.

I'm looking forward to working in short stories again, in no small part because my current novel is much longer than anything I've written before and because it has taken me so much more time to finish it than I had anticipated.

Such is life when writing.

Once I get through my little phase of short stories, I'm not sure what my next long project will be. I've several ideas, but I'll wait and see what my mood happens to be when I'm ready to start the next novel or other, longer work, maybe another serialized story.