Update on Works in Progress

I woke up this morning, had my coffee, and thought to myself, “You know, you should post on your blog more often. Maybe you could give everybody a quick update on your works in progress…”

It seemed like a good idea, so here I am… Where to begin? Well, so far this has been a pretty slow month for me on the writing front. Right now I’m dealing with several annoying non-writing related things, and they’ve cut my productivity in half. Unfortunately, it looks like these things will continue to be annoyances through the early part of next month.

I also hit some snags while putting the final touches on Titan’s Song book 6 which necessitated some story changes. Certain character storylines for that book unfortunately require fairly extensive redrafting from scratch. This won’t take that long to do once I have a chance to dig into it properly, so it’s not a huge disaster or anything, but it is slowing things down for the time being. Right now I’m in the process of trying to adjust my schedule so that I can get back into a good writing groove, and when that happens I should be able to finish it up fairly quickly.

One thing I’ve done recently to increase productivity overall is to start working on multiple projects at once. When I get stuck on one thing, I can move over to another and stay busy. It worked great for Issac Asimov, who wrote about 500 books over the course of his lifetime, and usually had four of five different books in various stages of completion at any given time. This approach is a bit of a double-edged sword because it might slow down the release of any given book, but in the long haul it should result in more releases per year, which is definitely the more important metric. We’ll see how it works out for me. Right now I’ve got four different things going, with most of my time focused on the Titan’s Song sequel.

The other things I’m working on include:

A book partially inspired by several violent and disturbing haunted (or demonic) house movies… Things like The Amityville Horror, The Shining, Sinister, and Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond. A very dark take on the Sword and Sorcery genre which is meant to launch a new series.An expansion of the first Secret Souls book into a full novel.I’m very excited about all these projects, and I plan to just follow my muse and work on the one that seems most interesting at any given time. But for practical reasons, getting done with the current “season” of my Titan’s Song serial has to be given a higher priority.
And I guess that about sums it up for this update. The current slowdown is a temporary situation, which should be resolved in short order, and in the meantime it’s giving me a chance to develop smarter habits and learn to make better use of my time.

Hopefully, I’ll be posting pretty soon to announce a new release, but that certainly won’t happen if I don’t get back to writing, so cheers to everyone, and I hope you all have a good week.