Draft Three Complete!

And the search begins for beta readers. I have a few willing readers already, that's if they can make it through all 180k words. Yeah, I failed to cut it to my goal of 150k words, but doing so would have taken out large chunks of the story that I would have had to rewrite and possibly change the story to where I didn't want it to be. Maybe I'm just too attached to the thing and maybe a beta or two may find something that can be cut or reduced (hopefully not expanded on, it's a doorstop as it is).

My next task at hand is to search for another couple more betas, see if any of them will be a good fit for me and my work, and begin working on book two and a query letter. I may hold off on the query letter for a while yet until I get some more feedback from my betas in case any major restructuring will have to happen, which I doubt but you never know. Ideally I would like at least one beta that knows their stuff about 15th century Romania and Hungary and can help me make the setting and characters a little more authentic (like the use of slang or terminology, though it's all written in English and assumed to be translated from these languages). It's a historical fantasy, so I have leeway to fudge things more than a straight historical, still, I'd like to keep the historical parts I choose to keep authentic as close to authentic as one can get.

So tonight I'll go hit up the peeps on Absolute Write in the beta forum and see if I get any nibbles, and swallow down my fear and let some stranger tear apart my work, preferably in a civilized manner.

On a side note, the search for a bill paying job continues and today I went in for a second interview at a casino I applied to for a job working in housekeeping at their hotel. I think it went well, the head housekeeper seemed really nice, he made me laugh and I learned more about him I think than he learned about me. Being that the place is an Indian run casino, as he explained it to me, anyone with at least a quarter of Native American blood, especially if they are of the tribe running the casino, will have precedence over anyone that is non-Native American, and I may be the most qualified person for the job, but they have the right to pass me up for someone of their tribe that wants the same job as I do, because on the casino's land, it is their tribe's land and state and federal law does not apply there concerning the Equal Opportunity law found elsewhere in America. And possibly other laws as well. Their hiring process has been quite slow, it had been nearly a month when I went in for the first interview and I had pretty much given up hope to get an invite for a second. If I do get another invite for another interview (I have no idea how many they do), I wonder if it'll be another month before I hear from them? In the meantime, I'll just keep looking and applying for other places (and not hear back from them), work in my flower gardens and now book two, and wait.