...sitting down at your computer to find yourself informed, gleefully, that the complete technical reconstruction of the computer storage and wireless equipment used by the protagonists of your zombie political thriller has become the weekend project of two of the biggest hardware gurus you know. Oh, and a veterinarian is attacking your animal action sequences, and there's a pharmacologist on-call to check your medical technology.

I have the best subject-matter experts in the universe.

I would make a comment about needing a good virologist about now, but I already checked the functionality of the Kellis-Amberlee filovirus by several folks at the CDC, so I figure I'm probably doing okay in that department. I love the CDC. My friend Shawn constantly worries that they're going to start tapping my phone looking for signs that I'm planning to destroy the human race with genetically modified smallpox, but that's okay; everybody needs a hobby. And I already have several political junkies, a few news junkies, and at least six zombie experts on-call.

(This includes me. I practically have a PhD in the living dead. Again, everybody needs a hobby.)

This is going to be the most fun book revision process ever.

When I write a book, I generally start with, well, text. After which, I poke the text with a stick until I'm sure it won't decide to eat somebody, and pass it off to my first tier of proofreaders (called, imaginatively enough, 'Tier One'). Tier One is normally five to eight people; they're selected from a small pool of prior proofers who have proven good at handling my specific first draft follies. Tier Two gets the text when it gets finished for the first time. It's about the same size as Tier One, and tends to be a little more vicious. Tier Three combines Tier One and Tier Two, along with about five new people. Yes, I have a large proofing pool. (No, I'm not looking for more -- these are people I know through a variety of channels, some of whom are in writer's groups with me, others of whom have just proven very, very good at what they do. What they do often involves grenades.)

I'm always fascinated by the way different people approach the editing process. I know authors who don't let anyone see anything until the book is finished for the first time. Authors who hit a single chapter eighty times before moving on to the next one -- they may be slow, but dude, when they finish a book, it is finished. Me, I tend to run as fast as I can from one end to the other, editing and correcting as I go, and throwing chunks of text to the wolves as frequently as I can.

Right now, I'm processing edits to A Local Habitation provided by Mary, who has developed a vendetta against the British comma. Seriously, she's like some sort of twisted naturalist, stalking them through the wild paragraphs, and clubbing them to death like baby harp seals whenever they're stupid enough to come into her sight. I'm afraid she's going to start taking shots at me. She's also going to war against my tendency to insert semi-colons wherever I can swing it. This is why I love Mary so very, very dearly. Also why I will never actually let her near me with a red pen.

I have about five stacks of edits to process after this (gulp), and then it's on to the denouement, which will hopefully do me a favor and not hit me like a ton of bricks. Ah, editing. Ah, criticism. Ah, snark.

What are your feelings on editing? How much is too much -- and how mean is too mean?

These are likely to come up with a fair amount of frequency, because, well, that's just how this sort of thing tends to work. So here's a list of projects you're probably going to hear about, one way or another, with a reasonable degree of frequency:

Rosemary and Rue.
October Daye, book one. Urban fantasy/fairy tale noir, modern setting, first-person protagonist. Status: sold, under review.

A Local Habitation.
October Daye, book two. Urban fantasy/fairy tale noir, modern setting, first-person protagonist. Status: sold, in current rewrites.

An Artificial Night.
October Daye, book three. Urban fantasy/fairy tale noir, modern setting, first-person protagonist. Status: sold, pending rewrites.

Late Eclipses of the Sun.
October Daye, book four. Urban fantasy/fairy tale noir, modern setting, first-person protagonist. Status: pending rewrites.

Newsflesh.
Modern political/zombie horror, near-future setting, first-person protagonist. Rise up while you can. Status: pending rewrites.

Upon A Star.
Young adult comedy/romance. Drama kids are awesome. Modern setting, first-person protagonist. Status: pending rewrites.

Lycanthropy and Other Personal Issues.
Coyote Girls, book one. Young adult horror/supernatural romance. Modern setting, first-person protagonist. Status: now writing.

There are lots of other books floating around here -- some finished and slated to be worked on further, others pending getting started -- but these are the ones you're likely to hear the most about, at least currently. I'll probably update this list from time to time, as things move from 'project' to 'print', and new things take their places on the workshop floor.