I’ve officially been at this one whole year and it has been quite the ride.
Of course, the writing part has been going on longer (I started Sekhmet in February of 2020 – although I didn’t know it WAS Sekhmet at that point!), but it’s been a year since I started this website up in preparation for the launch of Sekhmet. Since then I have…
- Published four books
- Done considerable amounts of work on three more books (more on them in a moment)
- Written more than 200,000 words (and counting)
- Shared 10 short stories/scenelets with another one due next week (more on that in a moment, too)
- Researched things as esoteric as “When was cotton candy invented?” and as rabbit-hole-worthy as “What routes did Swedish vikings take to Constantinople?”
- Walked approximately 728km
- Listened to more hours of music than I’m prepared to work out!
All in all, it’s been a fulfilling year and things are definitely just getting started.
Book 4 now has a title, Ved’ma, and has crossed the 50k line and still hasn’t (technically) got a completed first half. Oops. The editing on this one will be an interesting exercise, that’s for sure, but I should still be on for a November release.
Sage is also making progress. The first third of what I wrote last November is now edited and I’ve started on the middle third. This is the part where I started skipping ahead to write the more interesting bits (it was NaNo and my aim was to write something every single day and to not worry if it wasn’t necessarily coherent or consecutive!) so I’m in the process of filling in the gaps, smoothing the transitions and (in the case of one sequence) completely relocating it. The prompt for that was a real-world issue, but after I’d realised I needed to change it, I realised what I was changing it to also made better sense in-story, so it’s a win overall.
Lastly, book 6 is taking some shape. A little like Sage, I’m writing the ‘fun’ bits up front, but unlike Sage, it’s because I’m trying to pin them down as they occur to me. I think, at this point, I have probably nearly 20k’s worth of scenes that, at least nominally, will fit into book 6, although in practice some of them won’t make the cut while others will need to be heavily reworked before they fit. Once book 6 is finished, the ones that don’t make the cut will show up as Friday Fiction.
In other book news, I’ve now got Ruth Abroad imported into the software I’m using for drafting and I’ve now got a very good idea of what I need to do with that one. (Hint: it’s a lot!) With it set up in my drafting software, I can now start nibbling away at that and see where I get to by the end of the year. It’s not (currently) on my mental schedule for next year, but, if I could get it finished…
Additionally, there are a couple of new projects on the project notes page. One is a mid-high fantasy idea featuring the fae, mortals and a brand new world for me to play in. It very likely will be another series rather than a single book as the scale of the plot is sizable. The other is another urban fantasy/action/adventure story and is very likely to be a one-and-done book…then again, it’s incredibly rare that I write a story, finish it and think “Okay; I’m done with those characters”, so time will tell on that front!
Finally, in short story news, Friday Fiction will return next Friday. I didn’t quite manage to get my editing done while I was away, but I did get a few thoughts about how to resolve some of the issues, so editing will happen this weekend and it will be ready to go next week. (I promise!) I’m also hoping to get at least one other new story out this month, but that will heavily depend on my getting Ved’ma’s first half finished.
Lastly, look out over the next few weeks for a bit of housekeeping on the site including, possibly, a new header image for the new year. If I can find one I like in my archives… 😉
And that really is it for now. Happy reading folks 🙂
Grace and Fiction 