December Update

I’ve gotten a decent bit of writing done since the last update, although by efforts have been a bit unfocused. Another chapter of Thrall is done, along with a couple of chapters of the next Alice Long story. I also have another two chapters of the superhero story I mentioned in the last status post.

Letting myself switch stories when inspiration strikes seems to be working better than trying to chain myself to a single book, so I’m going to continue to experiment with it this month. I can live with having a longer delay between books in the same series if it means I get more total work out the door. But I’m going to give this new method anther month or two before I call it a success, so we’ll see how it goes.

October Update

I’ve moved since the last update, and the inevitable hassle of packing, unpacking and dealing with unexpected problems ended up consuming a lot of my month. But everything is back to normal now, and I’m finally making progress again.

Thrall has undergone extensive revisions since the last update, to address some major plot issues that have been bothering me since I started writing it. The original version had a major problem with a shortage of interesting antagonists, but thanks to a suggestion from my beta reader that’s no longer going to be a problem. I had to switch a lot of scenes around and drop a few plot threads that no longer lead anywhere, but all that work is now finished. I’m finally feeling good about the flow of the narrative, so with any luck that will be the last major revision.

Meanwhile, I’ve written a couple of chapters of that superhero story I mentioned last time. My muse seems to be pretty interested in the idea, so it may end up being the next thing I publish after Thrall. But as usual, I’m not going to make any predictions until I’m a lot closer to publication.

September Update

Well, I’m officially never going to publish any guesses about a release date again. I’m not a particularly fast writer to begin with, and trying to rush only makes things worse.

At the moment the next Daniel Black book, Thrall, is about half done. This book really didn’t want to be written, and I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to iron out various problems and get the plot to behave. It’s still my major project at the moment, but it will be done when it’s done.

I’ve also done a bit of work on an Alice Long novella, which will probably end up at 30,000 words or so. This may or may not end up being finished before Thrall, depending on what I feel inspired to work on.

Several other projects are on the back burner. I’ve done a bit of preliminary work on a Horatio Alger story set in the Aliceverse, a superhero trilogy that would be something of an answer to Watchmen, and an extremely smutty alien invasion story. But those are long-term projects that may or may not ever come to fruition, and certainly aren’t going to get much attention this year.

Re-Launch

As you can see, I’ve decided to re-launch my blog on a new platform.

Writer’s blogs don’t seem to be very effective as marketing tools, and for several months I’d been considering just letting mine go dormant. But the continued stream of queries has convinced me that it serves a useful purpose despite the relatively low traffic level, so I’m going to give it another try here.

Here’s what you can expect to see:

• Monthly updates about the status of my writing. Generally these will be posted on the first Sunday of the month.
• A monthly writing snippet from my upcoming works. These will be shorter than the chapters I post for my Patreon supporters, but still generally 1,000 – 1,500 words.
• Commentary on the publishing industry, my own writing and related topics, including occasional answers to questions posed by fans. I don’t plan to be one of those guys who writes daily blog posts, but I’m going to try being a bit more active than I have been in the past.

My current plan is to try this out for the rest of the year, and evaluate the amount of effort involved compared to the readership the blog attracts.