Well… today has been a publishing day. Matter of fact, it’s looking like this week (July 2nd – 8th) will be a publishing week.

The simple news is that I have Skullkeep up for pre-order on several sites. Visit its book page on Knightsfall Press to find the links to what stores have already finished processing it.

In the process of getting all the pre-orders set up, I started working my way through getting established with Lulu Direct, so that they will handle all print orders (i.e. Paperback, Large Print, & Hardcover) through the Knightsfall Press online store.

This is proving to be a time-consuming process.

Especially when you step back and consider that I have to go back to all my previous books to generate formatted PDFs (for Large Print only; hardcover uses the same PDF as the paperback version) and cover templates. My two short stories (Mistaken Identity & The Key to Happiness) won’t have print formats until I have enough to make a Sam Colton collection, which will be somewhere around a total of 35,000 to 45,000 total words… maybe even upwards of 55,000. Currently, the series is sitting at 18,206 words.

Speaking of the Sam Colton Mysteries, I originally wrote them as part of my experimentations with short stories. I have since decided that I don’t enjoy writing short stories anymore than I enjoy reading them… which is to say not at all. My main complaint is that short stories seem to end right about the time I’m getting fully invested and leave me feeling unsatisfied, regardless of the story’s quality.

My next round of experiments will be to try novellas as my ‘short’ format, I think.

There is also an excellent chance that I haven’t spent enough time with the short story format to truly understand and appreciate it. Perhaps, it might not be a bad idea to subscribe to a few short story magazines (i.e. Asimov’s, Analog, Ellery Queen, and Hitchcock’s) and start reading them. Food for thought, I think…

Wow… I think this post is as scattered as my mind has been all day.

I tried writing a little bit between 9pm and 10:30pm, but I was just too scattered. I’d probably still be working up cover templates, but a nice rainstorm came in and was sufficient to drown out my amazing internet connection. (Not being facetious, either; I love Starlink.)

I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress today, which is always good. But I still feel all kinds of scattered, mentally. I think I’ll tie off this post and work on clearing my head. Maybe veg out to a good story or something.

Oh… and a random fun fact. With the publication of Skullkeep, I have crossed the line of one million words published. I’m sitting at 1,051,188 published words, in fact. Not bad, if I do say so myself… but I want to double that–at a minimum–by the end of 2024.

I hope the days treat you and yours as well as possible.

Stay safe out there.