The short version: Progress has been slooowww.

The long version:

My big project this year was to finish writing and then to publish two new novels, conceived as a two book series with potential for more depending on the market. I don’t want to say much about the content at this point, beyond the general description of far-future high-tech science fiction.

I conceived this project as something I could accomplish fairly quickly. To that end, I wanted both novels to be relatively short, because short is faster to write, faster to edit, faster to layout in ebook and print editions.

Well, none of that worked out!

In early July I got feedback on book 1 from my freelance editor — and ouch! Her critique was harsh, but entirely fair. I’ve been revising since then. The overall plot is essentially the same. Mostly I’ve been working on the characters, changing their roles and developing subplots to add interest to the story. I think it’s greatly improved. It’s also a lot longer! And I’m not done with this draft yet. Given that it’s already October, and I need to stop work on the novel to write a short story that’s due all too soon, I’m not going to be able to get book 1 out this year as I’d originally planned. But hopefully it’ll be ready to go early in the new year.

Book 2 is presently an extremely rough first draft around 75% done.

I’ll admit there have been times I wanted to abandon this project. It’s just been so difficult to write — and I’m not even sure why. But I’ve invested too much in it to back out now — and I’ve already got terrific cover art ready to go! — so it will be finished.

Send me positive thoughts!

And do sign up for my newsletter if you haven’t already (the form is over there–> in the right-hand column). That way I can let you know when the the first book is finally out in the world — and I’ll probably do a cover-art reveal for newsletter subscribers, so there’s that.

Posted on: Tuesday, October 2nd, 2018 at 6:00 am
Categories: Work-In-Progress Reports, Writing.
Tags: progress report