Woohoo, lots of progress this weekend!

I started my weekend (Friday morning) with 92 pages remaining (out of 309) for editing. My goal was to be at 50 pages left by the end of Sunday – so 14 pages per day. Instead, I managed:

Friday: 25 pages
Saturday: 20 pages
Sunday: 17 pages

By the end of today, I’ll only have 30 pages left, so just under 10%. I have one more week of work, then I’ll be on vacation from 10/4 – 10/13. By the 13th, I want to have the final drafts uploaded, covers completed, and waiting for sample copies to make sure everything looks good. All of which should definitely be doable.

I will say, my plans for starting with the spin-off then moving to Book 3 may have flipped – which I always expected may happen after reading through Madness. I’m not ready to make a final decision on that, but it’s looking that way.

In other news, the next Short Story contest begins in two days! So keep an eye out for the Submission Guidelines, which will be posted on Tuesday. This time, there will be a prompt/theme that everyone must follow, so don’t start until you see it.

See you next week!

Hello everyone, sorry for any issues you may have encountered on the site. Some of them have been resolved, but I’m still working with the hosting company to get the rest handled. Primarily, e-mails are broken at the moment.

This week came with a lot of progress. I managed to get 31 pages edited so far (10%), which puts me at 69%. I need to finish around the middle of my vacation, so about October 8th. That should give me the second half of the week to get all of the markups implemented and hopefully get the final drafts up in Amazon and Ingram Spark to order a test print of each copy for review. I’ll need to get them expedited, otherwise they take about two weeks to get here – which I won’t have.

We’re coming down to the home stretch and I’m eager to get Madness out the door.

Also, we’re only about a week away from the start of the next contest, so keep your eye out for that. Hopefully this e-mail issue gets fixed by then, or many may miss out.

We’ll just have to see. So far, the experience getting these issues resolved has not been pleasant.

Until next time!

Yesterday came with a high amount of progress due to an extended wait while my car was getting a check-up, turning a pretty dry week into a fair one. Saturday added another 5%, bringing me to page 176/309.

I’m still a bit behind, but I have a vacation planned in early October that I plan to devote a lot of time toward editing. Ideally, I’ll be finished by the end of that week, giving me 30 days to update documents and get everything sorted for November’s publication date.

Apart from editing, there isn’t much else to bring up. I didn’t start outlining the Spin-Off like I wanted, but there’s no rush. I’m eager to get back to writing and can’t wait to call Madness complete.

In other news, the next Contest starts in 15 days – so start sharpening your pencils keyboards!

Mmk, this week has not been productive – but I expected that. This month will be difficult to reach meaningful goals due to my day job having some extra stress. It’s a bummer since I was glad to finally be moving forward steadily and this threw me off. But, it can’t be helped.

I’m still at 50%, leaving me around 60 days to get the second half of Madness edited. That’s enough time, though the reduced availability during September has me a bit worried. I have a week of vacation planned in early October, which I plan to devote to getting caught up.

In other news, the next Fantasy Short Story Contest starts in just a few weeks! The contest will begin October 1st – the Prompt for participants to follow will be announced on that date and can begin working on their submissions to be considered for the prizes like last quarter.

Lastly, while my editing progress was immobilized, I finally made the decision of my future works. I’ve mentioned it a few times over the past few months, but it was really a major struggle to consider. I posted the plans on my Facebook page, but they are posted below as well. Soon, I’ll probably place them on my website’s Home page so that new fans can see what is in the works.

Upcoming Plans:

𝗡𝗼𝘃 𝟮𝟬𝟭𝟵: 𝗣𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗵 𝗠𝗮𝗱𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀
Nov 2019 – May 2020: Write Spin-Off
May 2020 – Nov 2020: Write Book 3
Nov 2020 – May 2021: Edit Book 3
𝗠𝗮𝘆 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟭: 𝗣𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗵 𝗕𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝟯
May 2021 – Nov 2021: Edit Spin-Off
𝗡𝗼𝘃 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟭: 𝗣𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗵 𝗦𝗽𝗶𝗻-𝗢𝗳𝗳
Nov 2021 – May 2022: Write Prequel
May 2022 – Nov 2022: Edit Prequel
𝗡𝗼𝘃 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟮: 𝗣𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗵 𝗣𝗿𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗲𝗹

The timeline is, of course, tentative. Based on my previous works, I estimate a rough scope of 6 months to write each novel and 6 months for editing. Those may fluctuate by up to 50% in either direction, if I had to guess, so this is just a clean layout of the hopeful plans.

It’ll be a new challenge to write two books back-to-back, just to push off the next for an entire year before coming back to it. On one hand, it may be good to distance myself from it for a year and look at it from a completely different perspective. After all, a LOT changes in how you think as a writer in a year – trust me. However, I have to worry that the separation may leave me distracted for the next novel, or that I may lose interest by the time I go to edit the Spin-off a year later.

We’ll see how it goes. All I knew was that there was an undeniable necessity to start with the Spin-off. So, I have to go with my gut on that one.

It’s going to be a challenging path ahead, but I’m stoked for it.

I’m behind on editing, wooooooooooooooooooo!

Hah, not a big deal overall. I wanted to be at 50% by the end of the weekend but only sat down and worked through 3 pages so far. I have more time tomorrow with the holiday, so maybe I’ll crank out the last 23 pages to reach that point. We’ll see!

For those who follow my Facebook, you may have seen that last week my local Barnes & Noble put two copies of Orcblood Legacy: Honor on their shelves. On Friday I stopped by and noticed they only had one copy left. Believe me, that was a surprise. I even went and asked an employee to see how many copies were in stock, just in case the other was sitting in the back. Lo and behold, the other had been sold.

I’ve got to tell you, that was a pretty great feeling. Knowing that, out of all the other excellent selections neighboring it, someone took mine home. It gave me the confidence to submit an application this morning for the Barnes & Noble stock program to attempt to get my book in every store. I’ve never really considered myself successful or unsuccessful when it comes to writing. Most people judge that based on revenue, but I write mostly for myself and the love of it. But if I can manage to get it accepted into the Barnes & Noble program, I’ll consider that a huge success.

The process takes about 3 months, so I won’t have any updates on it for a long while. We’ll see what happens!

In other news, some of you may remember that this month I kept a daily score of which novel I felt strongest about. The most prominent in my head received a 3, followed by the next with a 2, and last a 1. For the entire month, the three novels next in my queue were scored to get an idea of which stood out the most over the test of time. Here are the results:

Prequel = 43 pts
Side Character Spin-off = 78 pts
Book 3 = 65 pts

Now, it’s still my opinion that by the time I finish editing Madness (i.e. Book 2), I’ll probably feel the need to move into Book 3. That would make the most sense, after all. But, the spin-off is definitely the one I’m most interested in. You should never feel forced to write something or it’ll show in your writing. Your lack of enthusiasm will definitely be picked up by readers and it could kill your entire story. So, let’s just wait and see.

That’s all for this week, orcs. See you on the battlefield!