In between reading and watching the Olympics this weekend, I actually got some book stuff done and finished my second draft of Assassin 2.

And it’s a really good second draft. Much better than my normal craptastic second draft. Around 100,000 words, and it probably only needs some minor polishing and tweaking before I send it to my agent for her perusal.

After the long, painful, writing quagmire Assassin 1 has been, this book went really quickly. (I started it around the first of July.) It was one of the easiest books I’ve written in a while. Wheezley claims it’s because I already built the world/characters in Assassin 1. He might be right. I also think it’s because I got all excited and fired up after the revisions I did for Assassin 1 and wanted to keep going.

And because I’m completely anal and always like to go ahead and write the second book in a series, even if the first one hasn’t sold yet. Seriously, folks. I’m that deepy disturbed. 😎

Anyway, I’m going to play hooky the rest of the week. Read. Watch the Olympics. And do some lighter stuff like clean off my desk and update the Web site a bit. In the meantime, I thought I’d share the first few paragraphs from Assassin 2. Hope you enjoy!

“Freeze! Nobody move! This is a robbery!”

Wow. Three cliches in a row. Somebody was seriously lacking in the imagination department.

But the shouted cliches scared someone, who squeaked out a small scream. I sighed. Screams were always bad for business. Which meant I couldn’t ingore the trouble that had just walked into my restaurant — or deal with it the quick, violent way I would have preferred to. A silverstone knife through the heart is enough to stop most trouble in its tracks. Permanently.

So I pulled my gray gaze up from the oversized paperback copy of “The Odyssey” that I’d been reading to see what all the fuss was about.

Like it? Loathe it? Share in the comments.