Jane Cairns, the person behind the Mystery Reviews + Writing blog, reviewed The Mark of the Spider, Book 1 of the Black Orchid Chronicles.

She calls it ” a good beginning to this supernatural series” and says:

I look forward to reading the second installment and learning the ongoing fate of Arnett, Campion and T.

You can read the entire review here.

Progress on the Sequel

The rewrite of Flight of the Spider: Book 2 of the Black Orchid Chronicles is almost done, despite accidentally destroying the manuscript once and discovering 10 pages of material I intended to remove still survived.

I’ve deleted 98 pages of material, dropping the word count from about 76,500 to around 73,000.

That translates into rewriting about 100 pages of the original.

I promised to deliver the completed manuscript to beta reviewers on Feb. 1. Yeah, I didn’t make that deadline. It’s looking more like mid-February. (More on the value of beta readers later.)

Once I hear back from the betas — they get four weeks to read and report — I’ll know when it will be ready to publish.

BTW, I’ve already written 200 pages on Book 3 of the Black Orchid Chronicles, tentatively entitled “Spider’s Revenge.”