Another full month gone without a blog post. But no fear, I have not been idle. The rough draft for book four in Sol’s Harvest has been complete for about two weeks, and I plan to start on the revisions later this week. I know there will be many of them for reasons I’ll get to much further below, but let me warn you—never try and write a non-linear set of novels your first time out. Keeping the continuity straight is about as much fun as a root canal san anesthesia.
I didn’t jump right on the rewrites because I had some housekeeping to do first. Mainly one more round of edits in The Woven Ring. Facebook reminded me a few days ago that it was five years ago I was finishing up the rough draft (with two broken fingers, mind you), and as of two weeks ago, the book’s been out for three (THREE?!) years.
As I said in my very first blog post, my prose has always been my Achilles heel, which I’ve always been sensitive over. What hasn’t helped matters is people mentioning “awkward phrasing” in their reviews. In my defense, it was my first time to write prose in over 20 years, and having gone back over the last two weeks to clean it up, I can definitely say that I leaned a bit too hard on a few literary tics and that I’ve improved drastically over the last five years. And one of the beauties of being self-published is that I can go back and fix up those awkward phrases.
In all, no plot points were changed (although I did have to change the name of a ley because it made sense in the original map but not the new one), only the phrasing here and there. I think it’s stronger now, so hopefully I’ll stop getting those 3* reviews on Goodreads in favor of 4s (Sidenote: I swear my score drops .01 point every 3* I get, and would assume when I get a 4 or 5* immediately afterwards my score would go back up .01. Not so, and I’ve watched it steadily fall over the last few weeks even though it does not conform to the rules of averages I learned in school).
So to go along with all those new words, I added some new letters. New cover typography, to be precise. This was done up by Shayne over at Wicked Good Book Covers and I really like how they turned out.
I’ve also put out Tales of Ayr for $.99 for August 15th because I know how much people hate signing up for newsletters, even if it means getting a free book. At least I do. So this will allow folks to grab the book for cheap and have it downloaded directly to their kindle rather than have to go through all the rigmarole of downloading and transferring.
So to celebrate these new letters, words, and book, I’m putting The Woven Ring in all it’s newfound glory on sale for $.99/ 99p for ALL the month of August. Here’s to hoping some folks will buy it and figure out this series ain’t too bad. Relatively speaking, of course.
I also have some fun stuff (to me at least) planned for the lead up to book four, tentatively scheduled for October 15th (which will be my third book out this year). After reading book one again then going on a long walk, I decided to create my own set of bix sticks. I developed my own divination style too, which I’ll share and maybe even read some fortunes on the Twitter. There’s also a role of airship captain that shows up in book four that I will see if people want to name. Going to have some fun updating my author profile too, and maybe do some custom Sol’s Harvest jewelry giveaways.
And on a final note that I’ve been putting off for as long as I could, I guess I should tell y’all that it’s been a tough few months for me health-wise. I vaguely mentioned an illness last time, which I thought was an ulcer. Now I wish it was just an ulcer. Turns out it is a disorder where my immune system attacks my intestines, which has been ten different types of unpleasant. Not to get into too many details, but I lost 20 pounds in six weeks (and I’m pretty thin to begin with) and have slept through the night exactly once in those two months. I’ve been on steroids for the last two weeks and should start immune suppression therapy in the next few days. Because who wants a fully functioning immune system? Especially right when your kid’s about to start daycare?
Anyways, I’m not looking for well-wishes or a place to vent/ regale everyone with my health woes. But I thought I’d mention it because it has definitely affected my writing. For one, I’m exhausted (when not roiding out), and I fear my writing is declining as a result. As in I had to pause for quite a while there to mentally search for the word “declining.” So that’s why it may take a little longer to edit book four, and I figured you all deserved to know. In truth, I should have seen it coming, because I swear every time I get into what I’d consider good shape something terrible happens to throw me off. Examples include a broken foot (twice), broken fingers (two), major surgery (twice), kid birth (just the once), job loss, etc. So this is all sort of par for the course and seems to just be a symptom of getting old.
So don’t get old, people. If you take anything away from me, let it be that.
