Writing Update

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update on my various writing projects. No time like the present, right? Writing during social distancing was difficult for me. Not because it was trickier to write, but because it was a rough patch mentally. It’s hard to push through and get creative when I’m stressed about other things. That isn’t to say I didn’t write. I did, but there was more wheel spinning involved than I would have liked.

However, I feel like I’m getting back in gear now that I’m returning to my normal work routine. (Though things at work are still far from normal . . .) Getting up, getting writing done, making progress on various projects. It’s been tremendously helpful to have a writing group again. They’ve already given feedback on SILVERADO, and I think that story has a lot of promise when I find time to go back to finishing it.

That’s the strangest things these days. Back when I was starting out writing, I preferred to have a book and work on it to completion. Now, other projects keep cropping up that always seem to interrupt what I’m writing. For example, at the moment I have XXXXX books in some stage of the drafting process:

  • MURDER CASTLE–Remember people! I have an actual book coming out next year. It’s been retitled to THE PERFECT PLACE TO DIE, as the thought was that MURDER CASTLE might present itself as a fantasy book to readers, and this is very much more a thriller with horror undertones. I got my edit letter back on the book a couple of weeks ago, so this is where the bulk of my writing attention is going at the moment. I took the time to reread the entire novel. (I rarely reread my own work after I’ve revised it too much.) I hadn’t worked on this since November 2018, so I was able to really look at it with fresh eyes this time. It was great to see how strong the book is, and I’m excited about the changes my editor made. I think it’s going to be a really great read, and I’m excited to share it with you next summer.
  • SILVERADO–My steampunk alternate history has been placed on the back burner for now. Not because I don’t like it, but because there are other more immediate projects that take precedence. As I said, my writing group has finished it, and they had some great suggestions. It’s a fun book, and I hope to return to it. The first draft is mostly finished, although I never wrote the climax, and when I return to it, I’m going to have to rework what I’ve got before I can move forward. I consider the first draft complete. The next time I work on it, it’ll be the second draft, or maybe draft 1.5. I was 90,000 words in when I stopped
  • HOUSE OF COWARDS–My epic YA fantasy has also been set aside for the time being. I was around 73,000 words into it, which is actually a huge problem. At that rate, the whole book would have been 250,000 words. That’s incredibly enormous for adult works, let alone YA. And it’s the first book in a trilogy? Yeah. I liked a ton of what I was doing, but I’m going to have to reassess it.
  • MAGIC AT 30,000 FEET–My writing group is reading through this right now, and I’m thinking about editing it to make it more of an adult fantasy instead of YA. Which will be strange, as it started out Middle Grade and has just kept shifting older. We’ll see where it goes. I’m not actively writing it at the moment. Just wanted to get the feedback from the group.
  • NEW ORLEANS–The project I set aside for THE PERFECT PLACE TO DIE is where my focus will return as soon as I’ve got the revision done. This is the second book I’ll be publishing with Sourcebooks. At least, that’s the plan. I was around 24,000 words into the draft, but I’d identified some problems already that needed to be fixed. (The biggest one being that I switched who the main character was.) It’ll be the 19th book I’ve finished.

So there you have it. When I take a look at it from a wide angle, it all looks quite industrious. It’s amazing what you can get done by plodding along at 1,000 words a day. Yay for small goals leading to big goals.

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