Hello!

I hope today has treated you well.

It’s been a very good day for me, the kind of day I would’ve shared with Mom. Because I finished my 11th novel today.

That’s right.

Dawn of the Sorcerer is finished, and I’m now about half-way through my final read-through for the low-hanging fruit of typos and fixes before I hand it off to my editor.

I have come to realize that I need to add a little bit to the final chapter. There are still a few things left unwritten that shouldn’t be, and I’ll take care of that when I get there in my read-through.

It won’t be my 11th published novel, because I’m not sure when I’ll publish it. Dawn of the Sorcerer and the two books after it go almost hand-in-hand with Series #1 in the shared world I want to create, but I need to write these books first before writing and publishing Series #1.

I know this probably sounds extremely complicated and unclear. I don’t mean for it to be. I’m just trying to maintain a little bit of the surprise surrounding the shared world. I’m really excited to tell these stories, so I don’t want to give anymore away than I absolutely have to.

I’m also trying to get started on another professional goal of mine: the story stockpile.

I would be an idiot to not realize how inconsistent in publishing I’ve been since I started this. I published Awakening in 2018. Then, it was almost a full year before I published Into Vushaar (February, 2019), even though I finished it going into Labor Day weekend of 2018. I published the first three books of Cole & Srexx back-to-back, July through September, of that same year and pretty much vanished until I published Archmagister the following year (2020) with Home Sweet Home a few months behind it. I published Smilodon, Roc, The Fires of Aurelius and Consular Times in 2021 and have not substantially written–let alone published–since Consular Times.

I am not an idiot; I have been wildly inconsistent in my publishing.

And I want to fix that.

Hence… the story stockpile.

The idea is that I develop a stockpile of ready-to-publish stories as I write the current “headliners” like Drakmoor and Primogenitor, so I can start setting up pre-orders for a given year–starting in January–and have the bulk of the series published by December of that same year. Except that the stories being published were actually written anywhere from a year to three years before.

And all the while, I’m here in the background, writing away and maintaining the stockpile.

I don’t believe in “The Muse.” I do believe in the Creative and Critical Voices, and lately, my Creative Voice has cared more about telling Dawn of the Sorcerer than it has Skullkeep or Tempus. But if I had the story stockpile, it wouldn’t matter. My readers wouldn’t be waiting two years for the next book in a given series; it would already be written and up for pre-order.

That’s what I want to work toward.

It won’t be easy. I hope it’ll be fun. I haven’t given up on training myself to write 7,500 words a day or more, so I can “slack off” to 5,500 per day and feel like it’s a vacation.

But that’s what’s going through my mind tonight.

As soon as I hand Dawn off to my awesome editor, I’ll hop back on Skullkeep and Tempus. I’ll be honest, folks; it’s even money as to which one I finish first. But I will finish them next. It’s time and past time, and they’re fun stories to tell.

Alrighty. I’m off to finish my read-through of Dawn. Have fun, and be safe out there.