Writing Update: May 2022
It’s been a while, so I thought an update on writing progress would be in order.
The Flight of the Aurora: An Augment Saga Novella
My next novella in the Augment Saga, The Flight of the Aurora, has returned from its beta reading phase and I am busy implementing the changes. I am immensely grateful to my beta readers for looking through my work and providing their invaluable feedback. Thankfully, there’s nothing major to adjust, so after another couple of editing passes, I’ll commence work on typesetting the thing - a process that ought to be easier this time around because I will be using my file for The Re-Emergence as a template.
I like to do this because I want to make sure I keep things as consistent as possible. Though, I am making a change to my body font. The Re-Emergence and From the Grave of the Gods both used dependable old Times New Roman, but for the series going forward I’m changing to ITC Galliard Pro. This is a beautifully readable serif typeface, perfect for body text, that I first encountered in the Library of America Collected Edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish novels, and I absolutely fell in love with it.
As for release date? I’m still aiming for somewhere around the middle of the year - I am yet to decide exactly when, but it’ll likely be sometime after The Re-Emergence’s book birthday in June.
The Shadow of Arcadia: The Augment Saga Book Two
Progress on the second full-length novel in the Augment Saga has been slow, admittedly, even after completing the major reworking of the plot outline. As of writing this blog post, I’m a mere four chapters in. The keen-eyed among you may have noticed I’ve sneakily changed the ETA for this book, pushing it into 2023. This is simply because I don’t think I’ll be able to get it out for the end of this year - I think it’ll take me most of the rest of the year to finish the first draft.
After that I’m aware that beta reading and professional editing for a novel of this length (comparable to From the Grave of the Gods) can take a long time. The beta reading process for the first book took nearly 6 months, and the professional editor I hired back in the January of 2021 gave me an ETA of May 2021. So after finishing the first draft, it took a full year to make the book ready for release. That’s a heckin’ long time. But that was the first time I’d done anything of the sort; I’m now older, and wiser (at least, in the ways of self-publishing), so I might be able to streamline the process for The Shadow of Arcadia.
I have actually already made a version of the book’s front cover, incorporating the top-down Martian landscape painting I revealed in this blog post. I’m not ready to reveal it yet, as I like to do that after I finish the first draft (and who knows, things may change). So, a little something to look forward to later in the year.
This Blog
I think this blog is going very well. It gets a good amount of traffic. I’d love to get more, of course, but that involves coming up with content that people want to read, which isn’t always easy. I’m of course going to continue with posting book reviews for the stuff I read - I have a whole slew of indie books to read and review, which is great! I really love supporting indie authors. I’m a fairly slow reader, and I do still feel like I’m catching up on reading the classics/heavy hitters in my genre for research. Balancing those two factors with the desire to read more indie books is tricky, and so it takes me a while to get to them. But get to them I shall! Thankfully, books are evergreen :D
The best performing blog post I’ve made, traffic-wise, by far, is IngramSpark & KDP: What You Need to Know, and I’d love to do more posts with writing and publishing advice, or at least observations. It seems that, and my worldbuilding post, have been quite helpful to a lot of people. I just have to get over the gnawing feeling I have no advice worth listening to first.
Anyway, I think that does it for now. Plenty to look forward to in the coming six months or so.
