8:03pm

It’s a good thing I decided to update my 2024 Writing Goal to a “best effort” setting. Leaving aside how fatigued with writing I was after I finished Hyperion last month, I lost yesterday to the First Day of Driving. I racked up something like two hundred or three hundred miles, driving around West Virginia running errands, and by the time I made it home, I didn’t give a hoot in a whirlwind about writing… or much of anything else, really.

I ended up going to sleep kinda early, but I was up and down all throughout the night. I’m hoping tonight will be different.

My day today started at or around 4am, when I realized I was wide awake with zero hope of going back to sleep. Since I had errands to run today that involved driving even more than I drove yesterday, I waited until around 5:30am and set off. I was one the road pretty much until I arrived back home around 2pm.

I won’t go into a full account of the errands, mainly because the one I see as primary is a gift. On the off-chance that the intended recipient has discovered my site and follows it, this is as much as I will discuss about my errands today.

Unlike yesterday, though, arriving back home at 2pm in the afternoon was early enough that I could rest for an hour or two and feel ready to dive back into Tempus… which I absolutely did.

From here on out, I do not have anything on the docket that will prevent me from maintaining the ‘one chapter per day’ pace… as far as I know. After all, Murphy always gets a vote. If I do keep this pace, it means I’ll finish Tempus on or around March 1st or 2nd.

Either way, I’ll focus on Tempus until I finish it. Once I do, my next project will be the series starter for my new series Draco Investigations, titled Denver Devastation. Draco Investigations is the series that spawned the idea for this shared world I’m working up, and as such, it is a companion to Sorcerous Pursuits… starting five years later.

I (and one of my best friends) have been looking forward to this story for a while. I was originaly going to wait until I’d written the first three stories of Sorcerous Pursuits, but since I decided to go ahead and publish that series, I’ve realized I can write Denver Devastation first and then hop back to ‘Pursuits’ to write Tribunal (Sorcerous Pursuits #3) before I dive into the second story of Draco. That second story of Draco is where all the material from ‘Pursuits’ comes up, so that timing will probably be best anyway.

The more I think about it, though, I might hop to Colfyr after Tempus. It’s sitting at 70% complete, and I’d really like to get that one out the door. It might be best to finish all of my in-progess titles before I start anything new, now that I think about it. My best friend might start contemplating various methods of revenge for making them wait so long, but I hate the idea of publishing The Shepherd without having at least the second story in the series ready to go.

Grrr… I hate Scheduling Calculus.

My other two unfinished projects are series starters, as well. One of them starts a series in the Draco-Verse (the shared world spawned by Draco Investigations), but the other is something completely new. I think I might table them for the time being. The Draco-Verse series starter… well… I’m not really sure what it adds to the world or my writing. I started it mainly as something to hop to when I was tired of writing Skullkeep. Okay, okay… I will confess that it’s a vampire story.

When I started writing it, I couldn’t remember ever writing anything vampire, and I still can’t… beyond this. The thing is, I’m not sure if vampires are a direction I want to go. I was reading a vampire story at the time a really cool scene popped into my mind, and I just took that scene and ran with it. I’m not sure the world or idea is sufficiently different from all the vampire stuff that’s been done to be even slightly interesting to the people who enjoy letting me tell them stories. And like the Primogenitor Saga, it’s also shaping up to be ‘Harem Lite.’

Anywho… I think I’ve rambled on enough about the story thoughts roaming through my mind. I think I’ll put the Writing Log screenshot below and call it a night.

Hope the days treat you and yours well.

Stay safe out there.