Hello New Subscribers! (And an Update, too)
I'm glad you stopped by
I’ve picked up a number of new subscribers over the past couple of months, and I wanted to give a special shoutout to all of you to say welcome!
It blows me away that y’all are willing to put in the time to read my ramblings, and I couldn’t be more grateful.
How’s that Writing Thing Going?
This is a bit of a writing update, along with a welcome for you new folks.
Since the beginning of the year I’ve submitted four short stories, and three of them have been accepted! The last was sent in just a week ago, so it’ll be a few more weeks until I hear about that one.
One of those stories has been published in an anthology called Assault Team and is doing well. I wrote an article on that one which you can find here. Included in the article is a snippet from the beginning, so check that out!
So far this year I’m up to a total of 17,087 words down on paper. That’s less than my goal, which is ~25,000 by this point in the year, but interestingly it is almost exactly what I’d posted by this time last year. Almost all of these words were written in airplanes or hotel rooms while on work trips.
Like last year, my day job has been very busy, which has impacted my productivity. I spend a couple nights a week trying to catch up on day job stuff instead of writing or reading. It’s been a struggle to get words out lately, but I’m still working on it!
At the moment, I have three major priorities, in no particular order:
A novel in my Lions of Hamilcar alternate history universe
A novel in the same universe as my three Night Hunters short stories (I’m still trying to figure out a better name than Kugh-verse, which sounds stupid)
A novella in a shared SciFi/Space Opera universe I’ve been working on with my writing group
The Space Opera novella is basically complete and just requires some editing and meshing with other stories in the universe. It will be bundled with two other novellas from the excellent writers TC Ross and Matt to make a novel-length book for publication later this year. You’ll be seeing more from me about this project, so keep an eye out!
The Kugh-verse (I really need to figure out a better name) novel is still in the early stages with about 6,000 words down to complete the first chapter and a bit after that. The first scene is… well it was really hard for me to write that. Ever hear that writer advice that goes “create great characters and then do terrible things to them”? Well, that’s what I did and it was pretty gut-wrenching. I have the first third of the book plotted out, but the rest needs work and I’m not sure I’m happy with the ending I have in mind. I’ll probably stop where I’m at and put an outline together. I find it easier to write that way, and it’ll let me do some careful thinking on that ending.
The Lions of Hamilcar novel is coming suuuppppeeerrrr slowly. I am a pretty detail-oriented person so I have a profound need to figure out all the details of this alternate history. I’m slowly coming to grips with it, though. The short story I just submitted recently is in this universe, and I was really happy I went ahead and put that in my schedule because it really let me feel out a character that will be really important later, and now I know how I get to him from where I start. On the novel itself I have about 8,000 words down. I have a very broad plot outline for three books, and a somewhat more detailed outline for Book 1, but it still needs work. If you couldn’t tell from the previous paragraph, I sometimes write the first few thousand words of something to see if I like it and if I feel it has legs I’ll sit down and put together a real plan, which is where I’m at with both of these novels right now.
That’s where I’m at as of right now! I don’t have plans for any other short stories at the moment, but I might work on one or two later this year if there’s an open call that interests me.
Thanks once again for subscribing to my rambling, wandering thoughts and I’ll see you next time!