The Literary Hamster Wheel

So co-author Michelle and I are back to cooking up our latest YA, due *gulp* March 1st, and we had to stop to do edits on The Dread Forest's Secret, our June release. That took a week, then we were back to work on the new book and now we just got the copyedits on Dread. The sound you hear are my mental brakes screeching.

The reality of being a published author is that you're always revisiting the past, whether doing edits on a book you finished months before or marketing for an older title. Our first two YA books, The Tree Shepherd's Daughter and Into the Wildewood, are now available as ebooks in several formats, because busy Michelle and busy Berta love alternate ways to get our stories. We're both big fans of audio books, and since Christmas, when I got my Sony reader, I've been gobbling up the digital reads. In between writing my books, of course.

You'd think that March 1st when we turn in the book we would get a little vacation, but I have two more books to write, and Michelle is feverishly working on a couple of others, not counting the ones we do together.

Why work so hard? We've asked ourselves that, and come up with two reasons. One is the feeling that time is running out. We have these great ideas that we want very much to get on paper. The other is that it's so much fun to see our books on bookshelves and in catalogs.

I wouldn't trade that fabulous feeling for the world. If only the literary hamster wheel could do something about my thighs.