Happy New Year!

I hope it goes well for all of us. Right now, I just feel kind of mentally tapped out, but here are my writing/publishing plans for 2022:

-Star Master Book 2: The sequel to Shadow Captain. Originally supposed to be the middle book in a trilogy, but is now going to be the second half of a duology. I have a new ending to write, and some character scenes and loose ends to take care of as well before I start polishing. The Gantt chart I made for myself in Excel gives me the first week in January to work on cover art and such things, before I have to buckle down and start writing. Optimistic release date: sometime between late May and early July 2022. Pessimistic release date: Christmas 2022.

ThornMaster: A prequel storyline about the parents of a character in the Star Master books, the three initial episodes haven’t picked up any interest on Vella. May work on it some more once I get Star Master Book 2 to the polishing stage; alternating between drafting a low-intensity work of fiction and polishing/editing a related work of fiction has worked for me in the past. I hope to keep putting up chapters on Vella as time and energy permit; I will need to do some more digging into Amazon’s policies before deciding how to handle the part where I compile it into an ebook.

Ancestors of Jaiya: still need reediting and new covers. New covers might happen in one of the periods where I’m trying to respark my creativity, but reediting will most likely happen after Star Master Book 2 is done, because I’m pretty sure I won’t have the mental energy for it before then.

-Epic Fantasy: Very early stages of planning, so early that one key plot element is just called “Maguffin Artifact” in my notes and the main characters are being referred to by their dayjobs (wizard, princess, knight… etc) because they don’t have names yet. I’m torn on whether to go forward with this; on the one hand, I’m having a lot of fun with the early world-building stages and feel more invested in it right now than the alternative (see below). On the other hand, my level of interest could change very quickly, and this series would be in an extremely competitive genre.

-Gaslamp Fantasy: The advantage to this one is that I’ve read and enjoyed a lot of Regency/Victorian/Edwardian fiction. The disadvantage is at this point that I have characters and a rough idea of a setting but no plot, and not much interest in developing it further at this moment. The other thing is that it’s a much less competitive genre than epic fantasy, to the point of maybe being a niche with not enough readers. All of that could change very quickly though.

From a Certain Point of View…

So, NaNoWriMo2021…not a success in terms of wordcount. It looks like I will finish the month around or slightly under 18,000 words, the lowest results for any NaNo I have attempted. However, I did have a helpful insight yesterday in terms of what I was working on.

Continue reading “From a Certain Point of View…”

Halfway Through NaNoWriMo, Not Halfway Done

I should be at 25000 words by now, but am a bit more than 10000 words behind. I think I’ve been this far behind before and managed to make it up in the second half, so we’ll see how it goes. General thoughts:

-Dictation continues to be a not-so-good choice for me for NaNoWriMo. The rest of the year, I use it mostly when I am burned out and fed up with what I’m working on. It’s more mental work for me to get my thoughts in order before I speak them than to type quickly and backspace through anything I change my mind about, and the amount of tweaking needed to turn the dictation results into some kind of sense largely erases the speed advantage.

-Working on multiple projects in NaNoWriMo, also not a great choice for me. I’ve gotten maybe 499 words on Thorn Master, and 1000ish on Star Master Book 2, only just started on Star Master Book 3 in the past couple of days. I tend to write my way slowly and meditatively through the second half (and missing scenes) of a long, complicated first draft. So, although mentally I probably needed to get the Book 2 stuff out of the way, doing that first definitely slowed me down.

-Anyway, feel free to learn from my mistakes here.

Kindle Vella is Here!

Mauti and her brother Embo have had their memories damaged by an evil psychic. Now Embo is desperately traveling from planet to planet in search of his missing fiancee, and Mauti is trapped in a dead-end job working for a shady politician. The mysterious duelist Roukazor may be Mauti’s only chance of escape, but Embo thinks Roukazor is the one who attacked Mauti’s mind. Can they trust him? They may have no choice if they want to survive….

Vella is a new piece of the Amazon/Kindle family, geared towards serialized fiction. I’ve started a serial called Thorn Master, set in the Star Master universe. It deals with the adventures of Roukazor and Mauti, the parents of Shenti, the mysterious spy from the Star Master series. This takes place about 27-30 years before the events of the first Star Master book. You can read the first couple of episodes for free here. I am currently working simultaneously on Thorn Master and Star Master Book 2, and hope to have the first draft of Star Master Book 2 completed later this summer, with an eye towards publication somewhere between December 2021 and February 2022.

A Good Name For A Band

Admiral Khopesh, the father of one of the supporting characters in Shadow Captain, is a fairly important character in the sequel that I am currently writing, but I have trouble remembering the placeholder names I gave the ship’s captains who answer to him. In a scene I drafted yesterday, I had to refer to them as [Surviving Good Destroyer Captains] in a couple of places. In the spirit of Dave Barry, I will remark that “Surviving Good Destroyer Captains” sounds like a good name for a band or possibly an anime series, and let it go at that.