This week is very high-intensity at my day job, but next week things start to ebb a bit. Last night I made some calendar notes so I wouldn’t forget what I’d promised; in particular, I’m doing beta-reading for my good buddy Devin Harnois. The first book of her trilogy, Not My Apocalypse, is out on 12/12/2012, and I’m reading the second book.

By way of relaxation last night after a much-too-long day, I read Cleopatra’s Ironclads. It’s a sketch, but it has some remarkable stuff in it, and now I’m curious as to what the betas will see. There’s such a tightly woven amalgam of historical fact and not-too-fictional speculation that at times it felt like a straight-up historical novel. (No, I’m not ready to write one of those, though I love reading them.) So this weekend I’m doing the preliminary cleanup before I send it to the usual betas. As usual, all the interesting stuff cropped up at the end, and I’m faced once more with a novel that has major load-balancing issues. Both the research demands of the project and commitments elsewhere meant that I didn’t write character interviews this year, and I think that it shows. (Of course, that can be a second-draft revision project as well as traditional novel pre-writing.)

Last week and the NaNo closing party feel centuries away right now, although this is the usual rhythm: meet some new people, get a pile of stuff to beta-read, and settle in for the cold dark winter.