Just the Polish

[The Doomimals kids meet the Just Us Chickens.]

I'm down to just one step before I can bring you those books I've been talking to you about, the chapter books called Doomimals (about three kids and their animal companions protecting the world from the evil Dog of War), Just Us Chickens (about the kids' allies, a team of super chickens, trying to save the world if they can stop tripping over their own feathers), and Key Lime Python (about a world-traveling, swashbuckling snake who is the only one standing between the galaxy and certain destruction at the hands of the Radiance).  Those lovely illustrations my niece and I have been working on for months are ready and waiting to be added to my teenaged boy's books and mine.   I even have an animator working on short, silly videos we like to call "Chicken Shorts."  I'm getting closer to being ready to publish.  

The one thing standing in my way is kind of a doozy and one I've struggled with for a while, and that's finishing polishing them and getting them ready for the editor.  I've already had a freelance editor look at the first one.  My beta reader is just about done going through them and giving me all her reviews.  Another beta reader has time opening up to read the rest.  I have feedback and writing suggestions from various sources.  Now, I just have to finish applying it to these books.  This is the hardest for me because when something feels finished and clear to me, I'll have other readers go through and point out the flaws and holes.  I'll hear about this new and exciting approach to editing that your book is not and cannot be complete without, and there are many of those.  

[Designer Hen, who can draw anything, and it comes into reality.]

It comes down to when is your work actually ready, and when does it just feel ready to you?  I submitted one book I'd spent a long time perfecting to a publisher only to be told it was nowhere near ready.  At some point, with my hybrid publisher standing in the wings, I will just have to call it done and submit it.  I know that time is not yet, but I hope it will be soon.  Then, you can start venturing into this crazy intense reality my boy and I have been working on developing, down to a periodic table of new and invented elements and a list of new laws of our alternate universe that feels like our own but isn't.  You'll read about chickens who know they're in a book, even one who has her name on the book as illustrator because she's just that powerful, and about so much more.  And it's all in bite-sized, 5000-20,000-word chunks.  It's going to be fun.  If you want to get a sneak peak, feel free to read my free short story.  I hope you enjoy it as much as we do.