Phew. Okay. The blog still exists. The power still works. Water hasn’t gone mouldy in the sink. Good good.
In other words, HI HOW ARE YOU LONG TIME NO POST?!?!?!
The last month has been kind of… tumultuous, and keeping my head on straight has taken pretty much all of my energy. However, things seem to be clearing a bit now and I feel like I can come up for air 🙂 So, it’s time for an update!
Writing is dribbling along. Some weeks have been better than others, but it’s there trickling away in the background, and some words eventually adds up to more words which eventually adds up to lots of words which eventually means Things Get Done. Right now, I’m “working” on Moon Shot, a middle grade sci fi adventure story set in the Witch Blue universe (that’s the Myer Briggs personality-based magic one – yes, it’s sci fi fantasy). I kind of lowkey promised one of my classes last year to put them all in a novel, (yes, that’s this book) and it took a Really Long Time to figure out how to tell a story with about twenty-five characters who all needed approximately equal screen time.
The answer, apparently, is to use an epistolary style. Epistolary used to mean including letters in the book, but these days it can refer to any other kind of text type. So Moon Shot so far includes emails, diagrams, maps, transcripts of recorded interviews, narrative, diary entries and even a short news article. It’s a bunch of fun, and hopefully the kids will approve of their cameos when they finally get to see it 😀 This one’s due at the end of October, but that will depend on October being a Good Writing Month, so we’ll see. Either way, I’m aiming for release in the first half of next year. (Ideally first quarter, but I have a feeling this one will blow out when it comes to formatting, so maybe second quarter.)
Apart from that, I’ve also been doing a lot of short story writing, specifically flash fiction (stories under 1500 words). Some of the longer ones will eventually appear as Inklets (in, like, 2022 or 2023, because that’s how far ahead we’re currently scheduled! o.O), but in the meantime my Q4 release this year will be a little anthology of flash fiction called It All Changes Now. More on that maybe next week or the week after – I can’t wait to share the cover, it’s very shiny and features my favourite colours!
After this it’ll be back to the Storm Foxes world for A Stag Of Hope And Memory, which at this point should be the conclusion to the series (yup, planning on a duology here). I have a couple of chapters of this written from back in May or June, but I needed to let it sit a bit longer before I could figure out where I wanted to take the story. I have Plans now, so I’m tentatively excited about getting back into this world after Moon Shot.
Apart from writing, there’s been lots of editing and formatting and so forth. How To Map came out two weeks ago (ish), but I haven’t done any announcements or anything because even though the ebook released, it wasn’t actually proof-checked >.< I didn’t leave myself enough time to do all the interior artwork (diagrams etc) and then didn’t have enough time to order a print copy for proofing before the ebook was due to release (and I’d already pushed the release date back once; Amazon only lets you do it once or you get banned from preorders for a year). Blah.
But anyway, that is FINALLY done and dealt with – I just have to input the corrections for the ebook and reload those files, THEN I can do an official release post here, and THEN I can cross that book off the to-do list.
After that comes edits and formatting for Liana Brooks’ All I Want For Christmas Is A Reaper. You’ll hear more about that later this week, because we’re about to launch a Kickstarter campaign for it, with more shiny Fan Kits, yay!
And of course, there are ALWAYS Inklets to be working on. Right now I’m in the throes of initial formatting and blurb writing for the 2021 Inklets, which is all kinds of chaos. I’d hoped to be a lot further along with these than I am, but worst case scenario I’ll just do them in two semester batches rather than doing the whole year at once, I guess. Blah.
So anyway, that’s writing and what not for the moment! And hopefully we are back to a more regular blogging schedule 🙂