The Curse of the Blank Marketing Calendar

One of my least favorite questions to answer is, "How's the book coming?" Not because I don't like talking about it. Quite the opposite. I could ramble for an hour about spaceship layouts, why hypergates should work the way they do, or how many decks belong inside a freighter. The hard part is explaining everything that isn't writing. For most of my life, I thought publishing a novel looked…