And I’m back…ish

Hello to anyone who still stops by or gets notifications from this site. I had to take a hiatus from my writing late last year and was unsure when I was going to return, but I am very excited to report that I am back to writing and building content for future releases. Since I don’t have anything ready to release just yet, however, I’m working through a bit of continued transition while I find a way to offer new content to my readers and rebuild an audience for when I am ready to release my next book. Below, I’m going to outline what happened, my plan for the rest of this year, my plan for publishing my next couple books.

What happened with everything?

I mentioned when I took my hiatus that I was experiencing some issues with my financials that were hindering my ability to get writing done and to plan for the expenses of self-publishing. I have completed the career transition I had planned to resolve that situation, the new day job is going extremely well, and I have restored the financial support for my writing which will allow me to publish books in the future. As well, and most importantly, I have time outside of that work to focus on my writing. In fact, my new coworkers have been really supportive of my writing, even though it doesn’t affect them in any way. They just think it’s cool. That’s been a great environment to get back to my passion, and I’ve made some great progress.

What’s coming up this year?

While I have made good progress, I would be putting out substandard content if I released anything polished this year. However, I have committed to writing 7,000/week toward my new sequel, which results in a draft about every 6 months. That should have the beta draft of the sequel to Wake of the Phoenix completed by early October, if not sooner. In order to keep myself accountable to that, I plan to update that progress on a weekly basis on this site. I’ll release these updates in short posts on Saturday mornings, as that’s the deadline I have set with my alpha-level critique partner (my husband). Anyone watching this website will get those updates as soon as (or possibly sooner than) he gets my new chapters. Seriously, he’s lazy on Saturdays. You can probably catch the update before him.

I also plan to finish edits on my short story collection by the end of the year. That is long overdue to be released, but I’ve decided to use it as part of a relaunch of my book one to help rebuild that audience. Which brings me to publishing plans.

Publishing Plans

So, publishing an epic fantasy series is a lot more work than I realized when I started this process. To that end, I am going to pre-prepare more than one release before I start putting things out again so that I don’t do what I did in 2021: release one book and then get lost trying to make the next steps work in too little time. Before I release anything, I will have at least my in-world short story collection, Tales of the Laisian Empire, and my sequel ready for release. Then I will do a soft-relaunch of my book one, followed shortly by a launch of my short story collection, followed shortly by a release of my book 2. Because my writing goals will get a draft completed in six months, I should by then have a draft of my book 3 reader for betas, and possibly some of the second planned short story collection. I would plan to have at least one of those out six months after book two releases, and the other six to eight months after that.

After book 3, I’d expect publishing to slow some simply because there is editing time involved in writing a book and there’s only so much I can pre-write if I want to release something in the next twelve to sixteen months. However, my intent is to keep up with my weekly reports on writing progress so that if I start to miss deadlines, my readers will know ahead of time and won’t feel like I fell off the face of the planet.

Conclusion

Releasing a book that has been a joy to any number of readers has been one of the best experiences of my life, and my goal from here is to continue to bring those stories to the readers who enjoy my work. I’m always excited to hear from new readers and old, and I will be planning and launching a proper newsletter later this year so I can connect more directly with those readers. But to everyone who read Wake of the Phoenix and enjoyed it…thank you, and I’m sorry it’s taken so long to get you more in this world to read. I hope my plan to bring consistency back to my plans will encourage you to come back when I do my relaunch next year.