I finished and delivered the edited manuscript yesterday. Copyediting is next, but all the heavy lifting is essentially done.
It’s been a very odd experience working on this final draft with the revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East going on in the real world. There’s a sequence near the end of The Mirage that reads like a metaphor for the events of the past month and a half, including a bit with Muammar Gaddafi sitting in Tripoli saying “We are next” in response to [spoiler] engulfing Egypt and eastern Libya. What’s weird is that I wrote that sequence, including the Gaddafi line, before the January uprising in Tunisia. So I’ve been feeling kind of like Albert Brooks watching William Hurt on TV in Broadcast News — I say it here, it comes out there.
I still don’t have an exact publication date, but The Mirage will probably be out in January. Reaction to the manuscript inside HarperCollins has been extraordinarily positive, so they want to make sure they have plenty of lead time to promote it.
Meanwhile, here’s hoping that the violence in Libya is over soon, and ends with Gaddafi out of power. If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s an autotuned version of G’s latest speech making the rounds on YouTube — think of it as the Arabic version of Keyboard Cat playing the dictator off: