July 2018 Status Update

Legends of Eifalia Book 1 Progress

26 Chapters Total. Received from Editor. Working on Post-Beta Draft.

Second Draft Word Count: 60,844

Post-Beta Draft Word Count (Will fluctuate): 61,292

Post-Beta Draft Progress: 2 Chapters done.

Middle-Grade Novel Progress

(Minor hiccups but plan to work again soon)

Rough Draft complete. Plot Edit Draft underway. 9 chapters compete. Chapter 10 in progress. [Total words and chapters not final]

Rough Draft Total Word Count: 19,920

First Draft Word Count: 8,448

City of Kaiju Progress

Current word count: 11,500 words

Anticipated release, Fall 2018-Winter 2019

Short Story Anthology Progress

12 planned stories. 3 in rough draft phase, totaling over 14,000 words

It’s July 2018. Happy Independence Day for those in the US.

Not much to announce, but I’ve been hard at work on my first Mini-Novel. I’m far more comfortable producing stories and I think I can start working on the plot edits next week. I intend on hitting my goal of a Fall-Winter release, which might be closer to the latter than the former. Once I’m confident on a release date, I’ll announce it, including cover art and a few excerpts.

As for my short story, I have thoughts. It’s a good first step to learning how to self-publish. I know I won’t win awards or gain a huge audience with one short story, which is why this Mini-Novel project is a good compromise. It’s shorter than most reads, plus I want to save my bigger stuff for traditional publishing. Plus these mini-novels are a good way of building an audience.

It also gives me the chance of pushing smaller stories out in between novel releases. I think this is a good middle ground and gets me to sell books in the process. I know the word count above is a bit small, but it will grow over time, especially when I’m adding plot elements in the future draft. My roughs will be short by nature, but they’ll grow over time.

While I won’t release anymore standalone short stories unless they’re for my main-line novels, I’m hard at work on collections that I can publish featuring fun and whimsical tales that won’t be as dark as the other two projects I’ve been working on. One anthology a year seems reasonable.

This is exciting for me. My audience is slowly building and I couldn’t be any happier. I hope you stay along for the ride. There will be hiccups (all authors have been there, trust me) but things will get better. More frequency is the goal and once I’m comfortable making stories, I can increase my workload. 2-3 per year is still the goal for now and I’m hard at work getting my novel into shape so I can send it off to agents and hopefully get a book deal.

2018 is the starting point, but 2019 will be huge. I can’t wait for the future.

That’s all for today. Take care, and remember, the inn is always open.