The first draft of my fourteenth novel is done. There’s backfilling and revising left, but it should reach you in mid-November.

The Stormcrows tunnel down in an ancient drill the size of a mansion, to reach a city that has been sealed under the earth for three thousand years and is running out of air. Urban os Storm goes along as the translator: a scholar and monster-hunter who has had eighty years to get good at both, and looks about half that. Mara, twenty years his junior and equally long-lived, keeps the peace in the underground city, trying to shield the common folk from the wrath of their deathless, evil Queen. Then this stranger from the Drill takes apart the centerpiece at the Queen’s midwinter feast and hands it out the gate to the city’s children, one at a time, with a greeting for each of them. Mara has served the Queen for decades.

It’s a prequel, but it will be numbered book four in the Hunter Healer King series. Urban and Mara are Maxim’s parents, and I feel like their story works better if you already know Maxim and his world. Since it’s a single book rather than a trilogy, and Urban is a bit more urbane than his son, he and Mara get where they’re going considerably faster than Maxim and Chloe did. Still no explicit content. As with the other books in the series, this is a gaslamp fantasy adventure with a romance growing up around the adventure, rather than the other way around.

I’ve been self-publishing for around ten and a half years. I’m a little horrified to realize that Phantom Queen would bring my average to something like 1.33 books a year. And also…I just turned fifty recently. It seems like I ought to have some kind of wisdom to share, but I can’t think of much. Here’s a few suggestions:

-Your first audience is always you. If other people decide they like your stuff too, that’s great, but trying to write stuff to market probably won’t work if the story doesn’t interest you.

-You have to believe you can succeed, you have to believe the result is good…and then you have to put it away and keep trying to get better than that. I wrote the first drafts of Loving a Deathseer and Marrying a Monster in 2010 and 2013, respectively, at a time when I did not know self-publishing was a thing. Deathseer was the fifth time I’d pushed a longish-form narrative (50K words) to some kind of conclusion, and the sixth time I’d done NaNoWriMo. Monster was published two and a half years after I first drafted it. Deathseer was nearly six years from first draft to publication.

-Keep reading. I know it’s a boring thing to say, and everybody says it, but if writing as often as you can is the literary version of practicing your martial arts katas continuously, then reading as often as you can is watching the masters perform their katas.

-Don’t make this your day job, unless you truly have no choice. Unless you’re one of a handful of success stories from the past couple decades, writing fiction pays worse than nearly any other form of employment you can think of.

-Don’t spend money on promoting your books until you have a significant back catalogue that people who enjoy you can move on to. See the part about how badly fiction pays, above.

-If you don’t know where you’re going, and you feel like you’re stuck, maybe stop and try to visualize the end-point. “But I don’t know how it ends yet!” Well, if you’re reading this, you’re probably not some high-faluting nihilist aiming for an unhappy ending. What would an upbeat ending look like, given your protagonist and his/her situation?

That’s what I’ve got. If you’ve been writing a while, I’d be curious which piece of advice you’ve actually used, as opposed to the ones everybody nods at