Farewell to February
February’s Failed Goals
Let’s get the bad out of the way up front. I intended this month to publish both This Is His Story and The Mirror-Hunter Chronicles. Obviously neither happened, one of which wasn’t really my fault, and I’m sorry. I still intend to publish The Mirror-Hunter Chronicles, but I have to, um, finish them first. I’m working on story 4/6, but it’s going a little bit slowly. After #3 I didn’t have a whole lot of concrete ideas, so now it’s a lot more making it up as I go, which is fun but a little slower. (I’ve definitely fallen out of my place in the pantser camp that I so adamantly remained in until last year.)
In smaller goals, I also failed to finish reading The Hobbit (I have about twelve and a half chapters left) and finish The Last Assassin. Why is finishing my novel considered a “smaller goal,” you ask? Because while I didn’t finish it, I got it to a point where I couldn’t continue without writing the other two books to the same point and started working on The Shadow Raven to work toward finishing.
February’s Writing
As mentioned above, I got to a stopping point in TLA and started working on TSR some more. That was on the 10th, and after that… I didn’t get a whole lot done. When I was planning and beginning my writing, TSR was my favorite, but now that I’ve gotten a good ways in and Nissa’s following her arc and all that I’m finding that it’s a lot harder to write than I imagined it would be. Actually, I’ve had this issue since I really worked on it in November. At this point I need to figure out what my antagonist is doing, outline some more, and figure out what these people like to do in their spare time.
With TLA it was easy for me to just write, developing as I went, and everything was developed and outlined sufficiently from the get-go. I did the exact same amount of development for TSR, but it needs more and I’m having to stop and figure stuff out again. It’s interesting to me how the writing process can change so much from one book to another, even within a series like this.
Lately I’ve been working on worldbuilding for my old story universe overhaul, my sci-fi/dystopian country Concordia, and my desert fantasy area Kersir as a means of procrastinating on TSR, which is fun and a bit daunting, lol. Worldbuilding is a lot of work. It’s totally worth it, but it takes a lot of time and effort.
But of course early this month I did publish my first book, my Short Story Collection Vol. 1. It contains four of my short stories: Lost Girl (along with an extended ending), Escape Room, The Paladins (a prequel to The King’s Paladin), and Silence. Lost Girl and The Paladins are both fantasy, while Escape Room and Silence are more sci-fi. The collection is available in paperback for $8.99 and I hope to make it available on Kindle soon, as well.
Overall I’ve written about 34.5k this month.
February’s Reading
I actually read stuff last month! It’s really good to be reading again. I finished The Forbidden Library by Django Wexler and Masters & Slayers by Bryan Davis; read As You Wish by Cary Elwes, The Girl Who Could See by Kara Swanson, and Colors of Fear by Hannah Heath; and I began reading Falling Kingdoms by Morgan Rhodes (which inspired my post on info-dumping). Overall my reading last month was really good, and I’m looking forward to staying in the habit, lol.
What have you been up to in the past month? Have you read any good books? Gotten any writing done?