11:20pm

Before I get into the update on Cole & Srexx, I wanted to make an announcement regarding Colfyr.

A reader informed me of a rather nasty continuity error in the final chapter of the story, and I have uploaded the new, corrected version. It could take a few days before your devices register that there’s updated content available, but the various storefronts should be finished processing it by Wednesday the 11th.

If you purchased Colfyr from Knightsfall Press, the corrected version is already available.

Right, then… moving on.

Okay. I’ll be honest.

I’m a teensy bit behind schedule on bringing Cole & Srexx back from the dead. I let myself get sidetracked with a number of things, and I’m just now starting the light revisions on …Till It’s Over!, which I had originally planned to have finished by the end of November.

In the long run, though, I don’t think it will impact the overall schedule.

December is supposed to be the month that I expand Haven Ascendant in preparation for the full re-write of Fires in January. Haven Ascendant is currently sitting at 70,940 words. I have a rough target of 96,250 for my novels.

That’s a difference of 25,310 words.

My target words per day on this project is 3,500. 25,310 words divided by 3,500 words per day equals 7.23 days… or eight days total.

That is extremely doable. Which means I can give myself nine days to go through …Till It’s Over! with the goal of it not actually taking the full nine days.

So, new goal!

Complete the light revisions of …Till It’s Over! on or before midnight of December 16th.

I will say that going through It Ain’t Over… brought the series back to me in a way I wasn’t expecting. I fell in love with it all over again, and that reaffirmed my desire to make this series something I’m proud of. It is the only series currently that I’m not, and I should never have let that happen in the first place.

And I can state for certain that I’ll never let it happen again.

I’m not sure if Cole & Srexx will have the full ten novels I originally envisioned, but I can easily see it continuing to at least eight.  We’ll see how it shakes out.

In other news…

I had originally planned to attend the first Author Nation conference in Las Vegas last month, but circumstances prevented me from doing so. I used a portion of the funds I had set aside for that trip and made an upgrade I have been thinking about for quite some time.

I purchased a personal weather station from Tempest… and it is awesome.

I really like the dashboard I can view via the internet once I log in. Here’s a screenshot…

Yes… it really is that cold here, but I digress.

I can customize the dashboard as well… to a degree. The customization basically amounts to changing the location of the different fields on the right-hand side of the image above. The barometric pressure, UV, lightning detection, and so on.

There is supposedly an API for this, but I haven’t looked into it yet. I honestly don’t know that I ever will, because the dashboard is exactly what I want. I have it open in a Safari window right now, because I prefer to use Firefox for my browsing.

I’d love to use Safari for my personal browsing and Firefox for my publishing company, but I got used to the Bookmarks bar in Chrome. Safari doesn’t have that capability, but Firefox does. If the Apple developers ever add that functionality to Safari, I will happily make it my primary personal browser.

My long-term plans include picking up a couple monitors, a couple mini barebones computers (like the Gigabyte Brix), and VESA wall mounts to create displays that only show the dashboard around the house. I don’t see myself putting one in every room, but I definitely don’t want to go to my computer every time I want to look at it.

The Tempest app on my iPad Mini is pretty good, and I like it. But I’d much prefer a weather display mounted to a wall that I could just look up and reference.

I have a couple different plans for the upcoming year in terms of my writing. Plan A is devoting each month to a different series, with the first half of 2025 populated almost exclusively by my existing series. The goal being that I would write a novel each month for the series a specific month is dedicated to… like Cole & Srexx in January.  😉

One of my long-term goals is to write 1.3 million words in a calendar year, both to be able to say I did it as well as decide if that level of output is right for me. I might decide it isn’t enough once I’ve done it two or three times, but that’s a matter for a future date.

Hrmmm… I think that’s all the updates I have for the moment. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for sticking with me.

I hope the days treat you and yours well. Stay safe out there.