Timing the Editing

Someone At Work, by Rinzing Yongewa

So, I sent a simple mystery, where a body is in a trash pit behind the inn, for editing. Simple line edit stuff. Look, I'm just against dumping everything on my long-suffering main beta reader, and I have many stories on my computer.

But it is a book taking place after at least two others that I have already written. One I'm confident in: thriller at a costume party turned deadly. Just my cup of tea.

The second one does a time skip, adds a kid to my main girl and guy, and then goes on a country-spanning journey to save Meiser from an ex-in-law and the whole country from starvation through a lack of dairy cows.

The second one has 120,000 words and is somewhat episodic. I fear that the danger is not clear enough, the time skip is too much, and that I have dragged in a religious subplot for 'reasons.' I think I know how to up the danger with the first main plot, I plan on running it by people more expert than I...soon, I swear. At some point before the end of the year? Or century?

I just feel myself running down, and I fear that I'm going into creative stagnation, that point when a writer is writing for the validation and not because there is anything more to say.

I'll fill in the time skip with a short story...sometime soon.

In the meantime, I am of course writing yet another mystery. If I sit my butt down with the short story and put it out March or so...but I've gone over it in my mind so often, have I wrung the juice out of it? That can happen. Happens too often.

It's pouring today and I'm recovering from a cold. Maybe I'll feel more certain when the sun comes out.