I'm still among the living. The pandemic has hit my family hard. My 57 year old cousin and his entire family got it. An uncle got it - after getting the first of two vaccine shots. My aunt was fully vaccinated and got it. Another uncle got it - again after getting the first of two vaccine shots - and he died from it.
I've been extraordinarily lucky and it has so far passed me by. I have a few vacations planned this summer (one I've already taken) so I'm hoping it continues to pass me by. I liken it to drowning - and that is probably one of the most horrible deaths I can imagine.
I've started writing again - just today, as a matter of fact. I cleaned up a HUGE, multi-chapter error that no one caught in 'Runesward: Tome 1'. I plan on reading through that again in the coming weeks to correct a few more errors or irregularities I found. Nothing I've found - including the huge error - really changes the story at all, but I'm a bit anal about making things right. I'll post the changes in a few weeks - probably/hopefully, right before I send Tome 2 to the editors.
I re-wrote two very important pieces of 'Runesward: Tome 2'; they'd caused me to box myself in in the chapter I was writing but I thought of a way out and needed to re-write a bit. I've also expanded a key fight I was unhappy with, adding to it in both material and points of view. It reads much smoother now and I'm optimistic I'll continue to think so during my frequent re-reads
I also fixed my timeline - it was a bit messed up, with people taking weeks for a journey which should have taken days, people taking days for things that should take far longer and so on. The main problem, honestly, was I moved one part a bit too fast when the state of their 'conveyances' were such that it couldn't happen the way I wrote it. That's been fixed and almost everything now makes sense. There's still one timing thing I'm not completely happy about but it's not too far out of the temporal boundaries so I'm leaving it (for now).
I finished chapter 19 today - but I may go back and re-write/prettify a bit with added detail. It's a common thing I do - I get the points out there, get the conversation like I need it to be and then go back and add details to make it more involved. I've started chapter 20 but I'm not happy with the beginning and may change it. I anticipate no more than 10 more chapters but I might be able to pine that down to four or five. It depends on some of the sub-plots and how much I need them to set up Tome 3.
Anyway, there's my update. I hope you all are dealing with Covid better than my family has.