There.

I just finished the final draft of The Flower of Knighthood. It's proofread, edited, polished and ready for the conference. I am sending it to my web design friend shortly so he can post everything hopefully tomorrow. He's been working on the download/Paypal page for the last few days and I already sent him the free sample file, and now he will have everything he needs. We wanted to get it all up and running last week, but as usually happens, it took just a little longer. I still have three days until I leave in case of any issues. I am very excited, both about finishing the book and about my trip. I have everything planned down to a science and I fly out on Friday morning. I am packed and have all my travel documents and notes in order, and I printed up a bunch of the book samples to hand out to anyone who is interested. I also ordered special business cards specifically for the book to direct people to the download page, but there was a problem with the order, so I improvised by printing stickers with the same information and putting them on the back of my regular editorial business cards. I would have preferred the custom cards, but these are essentially free, since I already had a few hundred cards and stickers on hand. I will print several copies of the complete manuscript to take, too, to give to several people in the organization that might be interested. I want to make contact with someone at the Rennes Tourism Office in Brittany as well. I set some scenes in my second book in Rennes before I ever heard of this conference, and I think they might find that interesting.

I have one other note of profoundly happy news: I started the writing process again on the third book in this series, The Engagement of Sir Gawain. That really surprised me. I was planning to just go right into editing Parsifal as soon as possible but three nights ago I was sitting in my bedroom sorting out my bags for the trip, and found that I had packed two spiral notebooks when I only meant to take one. I sat for a while with the extra one on my lap, and suddenly got the urge to write. I wrote part of one scene, then flipped the book around and wrote part of another scene. I wrote the beginning and end of that book already several years ago, put it down to focus on the others that were closer to completion, wrote another scene for it about two years ago, and then put it down again. I knew that that one would be the next one that I work on, and I have been thinking about some ideas for it, but I did not think it would start up so soon. The last few days I have been working on three books at the same time, editing TFOK and getting ready to publish it online, editing Parsifal and now writing TEOSG. That is part of what put me behind schedule with the last edit of TFOK, but I am not complaining. I think this is probably part of the energy of this trip. I am very excited to go to France for the first time, and I think the book is coming from that. It's also going to be a great way to spend some of my free time while traveling. Where better to write a book than in Paris, or on a train rolling through the French countryside, or while looking out at the English Channel from the walls of a medieval city?

I went to the downtown Los Angeles library the other day and did lots of research on travel magazines, so I have a much better idea of the best ones to send pitch letters for a piece about the trip. I also looked over some travel guides for Paris and Brittany and found a few more interesting things to to do. Did you know that there is a museum of Romanticism in Montmartre in Paris, and that it has free admission? I am so there.