Good evening, once again!
Many changes are afoot in the Outside World at present (changing job schedule, upcoming classes, blending the two), and it's getting...interesting keeping up with them at times; thus the delay in this post. Given the hectic, stressful running around this so often involves (especially at the start of a new school year), quiet times and the music to go with it become even more precious, and vital making it through the day, week or month. In keeping with this philosophy (and in light of how rare such times will likely be the next few months), I present as this week's music choice El Jazminero, performed by Spanish musician Luis Delgado for his album As-Sirr (Usual copyrights apply; I own nothing!)
I first heard Delgado's music when I came across his hauntingly beautiful work Epitafio, performed as part of the soundtrack to the movie Kingdom of Heaven (once a favorite flick, now merely okay :) ). This led me to the album that it came from: El Sueno de Al-Zaqqaq, each track based on the poems of the medieval Andalusian poet of that name. Since then, I've been gradually collecting more and more of his music (El Jazminero is one of the most recent), and it's always helped to bring down the stress and worry over a particularly challenging writing project, or just that brought on by life in general.
Though the latter don't ever fully go away, in my experience, I can say with certainty that the former will be throttling back a decent bit by the end of this week. The last (pre-beta) batch of edits on Bloody Relations is finally done, and I'll be putting the finishing touches on the last-minute new sections over Labor Day weekend, latest. Didn't get to much Cross & Flag work since the last post, but a few new ideas have been locked down for the next (and ideally FINAL) round of work next summer. Dixie Curtain work will restart a couple weeks later, maximum; have to add a fair amount to the outline first, before I can even start re-reading the draft to orient myself, so there's no set finish date or expected amount of progress as yet. The agency handling the For State & Country audiobook has confirmed that the recordings are done; after a last check, it should be no more than a couple of weeks until the book comes out on Audible. I'll keep you all posted should anything change with this, and do the same for beta-reads and other next steps in the BR work; meanwhile, share, review, and comment away like always!