It’s an Aster kind of day.

First, a public service announcement re-posted from the livejournal of my illustrious publisher:

(The reprint of) Horn failed to be delivered today but I have rescheduled for tomorrow and they should then be out in the post to the preorders in tomorrow evening’s mail.

If you’ve been holding off buying your copy of Horn til they were back in stock, as of tomorrow they will be and you can buy your copy here. Again, whilst stocks last – I expect to have copies for sale at Worldcon but there were quite a few reservations for this second printing as well.

Which seems like as good a segue as we’re going to get to talk about the current state of the second Miriam Aster novella, Cold Cases.

Today I was full of virtue. I rose early, I took my daily dose of penicillin, then I settled down at the computer with a cup of coffee and a Bob Dylan CD and vowed to remain there until the problem of not having a finished version of Cold Cases  was finally solved. I have convinced myself this is doable by promising that a finished draft today means I can take tomorrow off and prepare my next D&D game before we play on Thursday.

That was about seven hours ago, and since then I’ve heard Bob sing Everybody Must Get Stoned about twelve times. It appears to be working too, but I suspect seven hours of Bob Dylan is my limit.

The upside is that I’m finally tackling the pacing problems at the end of the novella, which is a very stop-start process where I build a scene and then figure out what still needs to be done to connect it to the finale. I figure that gives at least a 60% chance of hitting the end some time tonight (the end, of course, being an arbitry stopping point where I look for beta-readers who can point out where I’ve done stupid things that need fixing).