Bragging Rights Dept.

I'm nearing the home stretch on my most recent book, The Underground Sun. If it's news to you that I was even working on a new book, I'm not surprised.

See, I don't tend to talk a lot about what I have under wraps. I'm also discovering that tendency towards modesty might not be doing me any favors, much as I hate to admit it.

Most any day of the week, I can open up my web browser and see a fistful of tweets, Facebook status updates, LJ posts and blog articles from other authors I know. They're only too happy to tell me their wordcounts, chapter milestones, and so on — all forms of self-promotion that I have traditionally avoided.

I don't like doing such things, as far as my own work is concerned. Part of it is that I've been leery of stumping for things that are not finished yet, simply because they're not finished. It smacks of promising something that for all I know I might not be able to deliver as described. (What if I have to ditch the project? What if it's substantially rewritten? Etc.) That's the last thing I wanted to do: advertise for goods that would never be for sale.

But I'm also discovering that such honesty comes at a cost — the cost of not maintaining mindshare. One of the reasons authors talk up their work is because it reminds everyone, however subtly, that there's more stuff on the way. It's too easy to not follow an author's site religiously. The more you talk about what you have on the various burners, the easier it becomes for people to get back in the habit of staying in touch to get the latest updates, which are days rather than months apart.

To that end, look to this space in the coming days for some (literally) eye-opening Underground Sun news.

... ad invoke whatever good fortune you can to send my way to ensure that I get the damn thing finished by August 15th!