January 6th, 2025 Update. A New Year, A New Book!
That's right, the first draft of Reborn Elite is done. It's currently in the hands of my beta readers, and I'm waiting for them to give me feedback. I finished the main story Monday, kinda vegged out Tuesday, then did the epilogue and fixed the mistake I had discovered Wednesday. I plan to start the edit next Monday. Until then, I plan to write about a thousand words a day on my side project, do some world-building, and update my reference materials for my various projects. But overall, I'm taking it easy and not pushing myself. Last time, the editing process took me almost as long as it took me to write it, but I was still trying to figure out the process and workflow. I'm hoping for a much shorter turnaround this time.
That being said, I'm hoping to release three books this year. Reborn Elite will be the first, and then I'll go right into Book 3 of the series to finish out the arc. I also want to finish Rise of the Blood Moon Witch and release that on October 1st. I'll have to see where I'm at when I finish it; I don't want to hold it too long, but while it isn't horror-related, I still think that it would thematically do well in October. After I release book 3, I don't know what I will do. It'll be tempting to jump into Arc 2, but at the same time, there are other ideas I want to explore, so I may do what a fellow author does and rotate series. But yeah, those are my long-term thoughts for now.
Project Statuses
Main Project - Reborn Elite -1st Draft Complete, Waiting for feedback from Beta Readers: So the first draft ended up slightly longer than Elite Born at 134K words. Elite Born was 130k before editing, but that shrunk to 128k. Most of that was in the initial Quality Control edit, which is already done. I was thinking it would be about 150k at the halfway point, but the 3rd section went quicker than expected. So yeah, there's a good chance it will shrink slightly during editing, but also a good chance it'll expand a bit; we'll see. Tentatively, I'm looking at a mid-March release; I'm hoping for earlier, though.
Side Project 1 - Rise of the Bloodmoon Witch - 70,200 Words: This is a shorter chapter this week, but I got out of the chapter. I expect about two chapters this week, but I'm also not going to push too hard; this is a break week, after all. I think I have an idea of how I want the rest of the book to go. Basically, introduce some characters to be her Party, do a quest or two with them, and then go into the climax of the book.
Side Project 2 - A Penny for a Wish—17,500 Words: Third project is still a very low priority. Honestly I might just use this time to toy with ideas and leave Penny on Hiatus until I have to drive to work on it as Side Project 1 or the Main Project. I did work on putting some ideas down on paper for an idea that some people showed interest in and has been bouncing around in my head.