Well, Grog 3 has been out for a week now, and has set a personal record for sale; I was very concerned whether I got the tone right, which is always tough as a series continues.

As usual, Big Dee disliked my cover design, but he gave me five stars anyway, so we’re cool. Amidst a flurry of great reviews, Grog 3 got a 1-star as ‘unreadable’. I’m not sure what was meant by that, particularly since it is the third in the series, but so it goes: you can’t please everyone.

Publishing a project always demands three or four weeks of fairly intense scrutiny, study, and hard choices. There are discussions about the nature of supporting cast, the choice of descriptive terms, and of places where the plot needs work.

Once it is uploaded and the cover designed (always a process filled with issues), there is a terrible absence of intensity. It is done. Documents and maps are sorted into files and posted to back-up media storage, and the work area, both computer and physical, is ordered.

And now there is empty time where there was once pressure and demands. It’s a bit disconcerting.

But I am breaking free of it, and turning to the endless list of stalled projects and half-formed ideas that live in a computer file and a stack of jottings on scratch paper in the corner of one of my desks. It is time to start anew. It won’t be Grog 4 right away, unless a brilliant stroke of insight hits me, but I already have a general idea for the fourth in the series. But something will get hammered out in a plastic rattle of keyboard strokes.