What Am I Doing: August 2023 Edition

Time for another progress update. My summer thus far has been busy and full of children, as I’ve been doing workshops most days for our summer scheme – largely LEGO, but next week I get to do a creative writing session, which will be… interesting.

To business. First off: through guile, subterfuge and someone kindly giving me an invite code, I’ve made it onto BlueSky (which is basically Twitter but without… everything that’s been happening on Twitter lately). If you’re also on there, maybe give me a follow – I need to rebuild some sort of network and I’d love to hear from you anyway.

Jumping on BlueSky is part of my slow and painful attempt to actually market myself better and shift some books. I’m well aware that I’m rubbish at doing my own marketing, so hopefully more posting across many social mediums, and maybe a sale or two (stay tuned) will help get things off the ground a little. I know there are also ads and things like that – I’ll have to look at the budget. Maybe a giveaway or two, too, once I investigate postage. I have a lot of physical books under my bed waiting for someone to read them…

They’re not going to read themselves.

I have also done a few more agent submissions, just to pass the time. I still haven’t heard back from any of those I’ve already submitted to before, of course, but it’s still progress.

So how’s Boiling Seas 3 going? Well, as I said I was going to do in my last update post, I went back and started my first pass of consistency/streamlining edits. Overall I’d like to get the final book to 90,000 words or below, just so it’s not too much of a brick, though I’ll go up to about 100k if I need to. Nightingale’s Sword was 98,000, so as long as I end up around there that’ll be fine. I’ve split the narrative into 3 parts, as is tradition – so about 25-30,000 words per part is roughly on track, right?

Part 1 is written and has been streamlined, currently clocking in at about 26,000 words – fine and dandy. Part 3 is the bit I’m currently working on, as I draw towards the exciting conclusion (to the whole trilogy, which is still a very strange feeling). I’m currently at about 20,000 words there, which is within the theoretical limit, but has a lot more left to go, so I think the first draft will end up pretty chunky – which is ok, because it’ll need lots of streamlining and trimming anyway to get things all on track.

And then there’s part 2, which I have begun editing, and is, if I open the ‘Part 2’ document, currently at 25,000 words, which is fine. It’s fine. Don’t look in those two documents labelled ‘Big Scene To Trim’ and ‘Other Big Scene To Trim’. They’re definitely not the infamous Chapter 37. Definitely not another 15,000 words in there. Nope. Nothing to see here.

So in summary, the novel progresses towards being finished, after which I do a full edit pass myself, hand it off to my long-suffering proofreaders for their notes, make those tweaks, and get on with the cover and title in the meantime. Which is obviously a lot to do, but it can be done. I think I’m still on track for this year – just might be closer to Christmas than I’d hoped.

In terms of other projects, I am still awaiting the go-ahead to talk about all the exciting short stuff that will hopefully be coming out in the next few months – but you’ll know about that as soon as I do because I’ll be shouting it from the rooftops.

Aside from that… yeah, I think that covers it. Next week we’re taking a busload of children to the zoo, so if I survive that, you’ll hear from me again on Sunday.