Chugging Along

The best thing about writing is getting into that "flow state" where my study disappears, the computer disappears, and even I disappear to myself, and the only thing that exists is the world of the story. The last three days have provided work sessions like that, resulting in a first draft of the China story. It needs rewriting, it's 17,000 words long, it has no title, and I'm still doing bits of research for details I sluffed over in the heat of composition, but we -- the story and I -- have been chugging happily along. And now I have to stop.
The copyedited ms. of my thriller due out from Tachton next year, Dogs, just arrived from UPS. Because publishers always need copyedited mss. back like, yesterday, I will have to stop work on the China story and attend to the novel. There's two problems with this. One is that it will break my momentum on the China story, since they have entirely different tones and pacing. The other is that I don't yet know, having not yet opened the package, if this will be one of the welcome copyeditors, finding my lapses in continuity and regularizing my usage, or one of the ones that wants to be a co-author and changes my wording. Once I even had one who provided incorrect data ("You need to change 'Congo' to 'Zaire' -- they had a revolution, you know." Yes, and then they had another one and changed the name back.) This ms. will probably be fine, because I've worked with Tachyon before and I trust them. Just the same, I'm putting off opening the package until tomorrow. That way, I get a few more precious hours with Hao Haihong and Ben Molloy.