Happy Slappy New Year

Happy New Year everyone.

I hope everyone is well. To my fellow amateur authors: I hope you are keeping at it. To all the published and successful authors out there: congratulations, I'm looking forward to reading more of your stuff. And to the good people at Ourmeets.com, who for reasons unknown to myself, keep getting directed to my little writing blog: best of luck finding each other.

Here's where I am:

1. The Werechicken. It's done, completed, wrapped up with a bow, and currently under scrutiny by the robots at Angry Robot publishing. If it turns out that they don't want it, my plan is to self-publish it.

I've got a little bit of experience self-publishing short stories and novellas (see sidebar), but have never published anything as long as a novel yet. The Werechicken will be my first. I've been reading about creating a professional product when self-pubbing and that one of the things that absolutely should not  be done is just to submit a Word document to Amazon and trust their automated system to get everything absolutely correct. Unfortunately, that's exactly what I've been doing thus far. Boo at me.

2. The Vampire Horse and Technically a Dragon.

Parts 2 and 3 of the Werechicken Saga are being written in tandem as 2 parts of a long story. I'm writing each character's story separately (on an experimental basis). I'm currently 82k words deep into the main character's stroryline, which will finish up at about 90k words. In total I'm expecting the whole thing to be over 200k words, which will hopefully split nicely into two novels.

3. Other Ideas.

I have no plans for any shorter works in the near future, I have six so far, which is enough to supplement my bookshelf for now. It will all be novels from here on out - for the time being anyway. So quite apart from The Werechicken Saga, I have a few other ideas.

I think the best idea would be to finish TVH and TAD, leave them for a long while, and in the mean time get a few other ideas down on paper. Once those are done: get redrafting (my least favourite part of the process).


So the year ahead should be exciting. Not just in terms of my writing career, but I also qualify as a fully-fledged lawyer, which certainly won't give me any extra time for writing, but I'm committed to it, so I'll make time :-)

S.J.