Thanks everyone. It's setting in now. I do feel like every good event in my life is immediately balanced by something awful, so I'm keeping a sense of hardened realism about this. On the one hand, I'm thrilled that more people than my poor beta readers liked this book. On the other, this is much closer to my heart and soul than my little M/M contemporary, or even my M/M space opera. Scary stuff. Opening the veins and showing my blood, kind of stuff.
The Mr continues to improve so we are cautiously optimistic.
To distract myself (which is usually how I jump on projects) I'm writing more on the Neolithic gay romance. Which is turning, of course, into a sweet friends-to-lovers tale with some heavy side issues like early parental death and indentured servitude. But boy are the characters talking to me again: 2650 words in 3 hours tonight. I think it's because the editor really really wants this one, too. I've got about 12K of it written so far, but estimate it needs about another 8 to 9K to be a complete story.
I outlined it in 2014, so all I'm doing is expanding one chapter per plot point. With whatever swerves and variations happen.
In case any of you ever want to burn your old stories or degauss the hard drives...don't. The 102K story that sold to NineStar today is the extension of a 6K short I wrote in '96 or '97, then trunked after too many people said 'It reads like an outline, show me the real story.' When I got back to it in 2013, I realized they'd been right.
The Neolithic romance is expanded from a 3K het romance short I wrote in 1989, and trunked until a romance call in 2014 made me think 'This would be a great M/M story'. The 4K version of that didn't sell, but I kept playing with it. The editor has hinted he'd like to contract it as soon as it's finished.