August Writing Update
Another month, another writing update! Man, where has the year gone? I can’t believe it’s nearly September already and that winter is pretty much over. I’m gonna miss my oodie!
Last month was pretty much a holding pattern, waiting to hear about my mentorship, working on book 3 of Legacy of Ash and Smoke, and a few considerations about AI usage for audiobooks. This month, things have finally started happening.
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First, the bad news: my mentorship application was knocked back. Why? Because it wasn’t seen as “value for money”, and apparently there are other cheaper alternatives available. Of course, they didn’t indicate what those other cheaper alternatives were, and I certainly have never found any. Needless to say, this pissed me off and sent me into a bit of a mental health spiral for a while. It’s incredibly frustrating, but I guess that means I’ll have to keep going it alone because I certainly can’t afford to pay for it myself on a disability pension.
To counter that bad news, I have lots of very good news.
First up is the Logan Book Fest. The Logan Book Fest is a free event held in Beenleigh, Queensland on the 24th of October. If you’re in the area, I would highly recommend taking a look, whether you’re a writer or a reader. Not only are there tons of stalls where you can chat with the authors and buy their books direct (this is the best way to support authors, as it cuts out the middleman and you can often get the books cheaper because of that), but there are free and paid (no more than $20) hour-long workshops, and live readings.
For myself, I will have a half table there to sell my debut Salt and Ice. Then at 1pm I’ll be doing a live reading of the first one and a bit chapters of Salt and Ice (so if you’re not sure if the book is for you, this is a great way to get a sneak peek). And finally, at 3pm I’ll be running an hour-long premium workshop running through the free program of Lore Forge, including creating a project from the ground up with audience participation.
I am absolutely terrified! But also pretty excited.
If you’re in the area, I would love to see you there, so please come and say hi :)
The next bit of good news is I have FINALLY finished the zero draft of book 3! Throws confetti! I seriously felt like I would never reach this point. Where books 1 and 2 were zero drafted in about 6 weeks each, this one has taken several months!
Okay, I know part of the reason for that was some mental health struggles that decided to appear, and it took probably about a month or more to fully recover from that.
But then there’s also the fact that I had so much trouble getting into the head of one of the point of view character’s: Garrett. Everything about him is pretty different to how I approach the world, so where most characters have a little bit of me in them, or at least I can see and empathise with their point of view (yes, even the antagonist), Garrett was so fundamentally different that he was hard to get right. He’s still not perfect, but it’s done, and that means it can be edited to perfection.
The other hurdle was that this book leans a lot further into horror than anything I’ve ever written before. Now, I am probably the biggest wuss you’ll ever meet. I don’t like to be scared. Creepy is okay if I’m in a good headspace for it, but even that I very rarely explore. I read a couple Stephen King books as a teenager, and I read a couple gothic horror books in university, and that was about it. This book has a lot of environmental and body horror in it, so I was researching and learning as I went. It’s fantastic — I’m now way more interested in horror as a genre than I ever have been before — but the process did slow me down.
In addition to all of that, as you may remember, Legacy is based on an old fanfiction I wrote years ago. While books 1 and 2 cover events that I created with only a few tweaks needed to change it from the source material, what happens in book 3 was very much a retelling of the source material. That meant the entire thing needed to change. I had a few events that I wanted to keep the same, but I had to change all the details, everything leading up to those events and everything that happened afterwards. Don’t get me wrong, I had a lot of fun doing it. I am a writer after all; I love creating worlds. But I can’t deny that it took more brain power than simply tweaking something I’ve already written.
My first editing pass will be to thread through Garrett’s imposter syndrome since I pretty much ignored that facet of his personality, but that will be a lot easier now that I have the basics down.
And then it’s on to plotting book 4! This one should be interesting. It covers things in my fanfiction that are nearly entirely original, as it filled in a time jump that occurred in the source material. That means book 4 should be done fairly quickly. Then book 5 is another where I need to change significant portions of it, so it will probably take a while.
My goal for Legacy is to finish book 4’s zero draft by the end of the year, with my stretch goal to finish book 5 by the end of the year. After that will be going through all my notes and reminders, reading through the series from start to finish making sure I haven’t contradicted anything, making sure the zero draft hits all the beats I want it to. Then comes transforming it into proper prose. That’s the part I’m really looking forward to!
My current plan is to finish the entire series before releasing book 1. My reasoning for this is twofold (even if it does mean a longer wait for people who like my writing).
First, it will let me edit book 1 if I think of something or find an issue when I’m already working on book 5. I am terrified of publishing book 1 before I have finished the series and then realising I’ve stuffed something up, or I need to change something to make it better, and people have already bought that version, so I just have to live with it. I would rather be happy with the series as a whole before releasing it into the wild.
Secondly, it will let me get ahead. This series is 5 books. If I release one book a month, that’s at least five months I’ve got to stagger that series, or six months if I release a box set special edition after the entire series is completed. That’s six months where I can be working on the next project, meaning it won’t be such a long break in between releases as it has been this time around. That’s the plan anyway.
Finally, I am also working on a new secret project. I can’t reveal too much about it just yet, and honestly, if it doesn’t work out, I will probably not share anything about it. But let’s just say I have yet another cheat project in the works, hehe.
That’s about it for me this month. How’s your writing going? Let me know in the comments!
