Three books on the road to readers
I have three books in process at the moment, which is sometimes confusing, since they're very different. One project, my thriller Got Trouble, is the closest to release. I've got my cover designer working on a cover, and I hope to have a preview of that for my next newsletter. I need to do another editing run through it and then get it to my proofreader, but I'm excited to be nearing the end.
My next sci fi book, about a former space marine working security at an alien archeological site on a far-flung world, is in the early stages of editing. I don't have a title yet, and nobody but me has read it, so it's a little farther from done. I was messing around in MidJourney, the AI illustrator, and I got it to make some potential cover images I like. I'm including a couple of options here just for kicks. Using AI art for commercial purposes is still an unexplored legal and ethical space, so I will have to think about that and read up on it before committing to it, but I did think what I got to (after a lot of trial and error) is neat.
I am in the middle of my first editing pass on this book, and I'm through about 91 pages of the 191 pages it spans in Microsoft Word. It will likely be a 400-page paperback, comparable in length to my other books, at about 105,000 words. I'm able to edit about 10-15 pages an hour, so I still have a ways to go with it, especially with my new writing project (see next paragraph!). After the first run, I'll share it with my team of early readers to see what they think.
I have also started another book set in the modern world, more of a suspense novel than thriller. It is about a frustrated former academic who was forced out of his job, so me circa 2020 :-). Write what you know, right? That's just his background, though - the important part is that he gets embroiled in a mystery left behind for him by his mother, a mystery a lot of other people seem to know more about than he does, including people willing to frame him for crimes. I've taken this on as a NaNoWriMo challenge, and I've been writing every day, sometimes for 4-5 hours, which is a lot for me to sustain. I'm about halfway through. The NaNo goal is 50,000 words in a month, and I'm well on my way to that, with over 42,000 in my first two weeks. I'm actually hoping to finish a first draft of this one in November, but whether I can keep up this pace, especially with holidays coming up, is uncertain. Here's my progress chart from the NaNoWriMo site:
A nice surprise
I discovered a week or so ago that Flames Over Frosthelm was nominated for the Indie Ink Awards in several categories. It's so nice to see Marten and Boog's grand adventure get some love. The awards are split into categories, with the number of reader nominations deciding which books make the finals. Flames didn't make the cut, but it was really nice to see that somebody (or somebodies) had thought to nominate it.
My side hustle
My readers are sometimes not aware that I also design boardgames and puzzle games. I've gotten a new entry in my Doctor Esker's Notebook series of puzzle card games mostly finished now, and I'm running a Kickstarter campaign to build some buzz for this new edition, due out next year. I was not expecting the response - the crowdfunding campaign reached its goal in the first day and has moved beyond that by quite a bit. I'm really excited that people are signing up. If you'd like to learn more about the game and the campaign, and also to see a desperately cheesy video poem I created for the campaign video, click on the campaign link here:
|
