Merging Realities

I finished going over the page proofs for Don't Hex With Texas yesterday afternoon. It was a pretty clean text, with only nine pages that had errors. And, you know what? This is a good book, even if I say so myself. I really like it. I also think it's pretty accessible, even though I wrote it as the second half of a two-parter with Damsel Under Stress. Of course, if you've read the whole series, you'll get more of the nuances and references, but you could pick this one up as the first one you read and still not feel totally lost because a lot of it is a fairly self-contained story. You'd be spoiled for the previous books if you wanted to go back and read them, but I think if someone sees that totally fun cover and picks it up out of curiosity, they'd still enjoy the book.

A couple of things I noticed and found amusing:
A very, very minor character in this book (Katie's infant niece) has the same name as the heroine of the book I just finished. I guess I like that name, but it fits perfectly in both cases, and since the two books take place in entirely different universes, I don't think there's a problem.

I wrote this book during the summer of 2006. I didn't watch my first episode of Supernatural until February of 2007. One of Katie's brothers is named Dean (and remember, I created him before I ever saw the other Dean). The physical description is different, and the core character is very different, but there are some personality similarities between my Dean and Supernatural Dean. And then there's my character Sam, who is a gargoyle and who is absolutely nothing like Supernatural Sam (and my Sam was created in 2003). When I had taken a break from proofreading and came back to a section where Dean was talking to Sam the gargoyle, it actually took me a second or two to get back into my world and envision the right characters because I was picturing Dean and Sam from Supernatural in that scene. Fortunately, Owen showed up in the scene and saved the day by snapping me into the correct reality. Until yesterday, it had never even crossed my mind that I had characters named Sam and Dean in the same book. And now, of course, I've planted that in your head, so whenever you read a scene with Sam and Dean, you'll find yourself giggling.

There is actually a TV-related inside joke in the book, but that's not it. Figuring out the joke will require a knowledge of some of my obsessions, this book, and a Texas map.

Now that I'm totally finished with this book, aside from the promoting of it, I need to run some errands I've been putting off all week.