First up, le website. I had to do a reboot last week, and as part of that, the shop plugin crashed. I plan to work on fixing that on the weekend, but for now if you’re in Australia and want to buy a signed book from me, best to use the Contact page.
Next up, blogging! I *think* we are back to your regularly scheduled 5-a-week-on-weekdays. At least, as much as we ever were, right? Not sure I’ll have a *whole* lot to say sometimes, but then, that hasn’t stopped me in the past, so NEVER MIND ABOUT THAT.
Finally, BOOKS.
Okay. Peeps. Imma level with you here. I legit did not expect a) to have to be retested for celiac disease AT ALL this year, and b) when I did, I really didn’t expect it to be as bad as it was. It was Bad. Actually, it was probably BAD. It’s over now (see yesterday), which, yay, but it means that my pretty writing and release schedule for this year? Yeah. Gone-skis.
So! Rescheduling time.
First up, because I promised a group of children and it’s very important to keep promises to children, I need to write a sci-fi adventure thing. This one is upper middle grade (again, like Sanctuary) and should be around the 40k mark. *IF* I was running at normal brain power etc, I could honestly have this done in 6 weeks. Right now, since I’m not *quite* back up to speed yet and I’m definitely out of practice maintaining long writing sprints, I’d estimate that it will take me more like 10-12. (eek). (Also, this is a centuries-prior prequel to the Witch Blue series with the personality-based magic that is ridiculously popular every time I mention it, just fyi.)
Then… Well, look. We’re all just going to need to get super comfy with the idea that I can’t write two books in the same series back-to-back, okay? I’m about a third of the way done with #FoxBook rewrites, and have another third of draft material that’s being pulled straight in without much more than polishing. About 20-30k of new material, 25kish of draft to polish… Again, at normal speed I could have that done in 2-3 months. We’ll see.
THEN after that I can finally crack on with Mercury‘s second book, How Not To Ring The Hero’s Bell. I have the first two chapters written, and the general plot has kind of congealed in the background of working on other stuff, so that’s great. I’m getting excited to get back to work on this one, which is always a good sign.
Also pottering away in the background is How To Create Life, the next Inkprint Writers book that walks you through the ways in which plants and animals adapt to their climate zones, and how to create new species that are realistically responsive to their environments. It’s with the content editor at the moment.
The *plan* (she says, somewhat ironically) was to have #FoxBook ready for a November release, with the second Mercury book coming out in March or April (i.e. a year after book 1, which is nice because: industry standard etc). However, that was *without* the addition of the sci-fi adventure heisty thing, and obviously without allowing for the huge time suck that was celiac testing.
Right now? Who knows. I certainly don’t.
So: rest assured, there are more books coming, and they are in the pipeline. I super appreciate your patience in the meantime <3 And if you need new things to read, don’t forget the Inklets are still releasing on the 1st and 15th of every month! I’ve started work on the 2020 line up (which, how are we nearly in the 20s already?!), and it’s looking GRAND. So much excitement, you guys B-)
Hurrah!