Category: The People of the Last Harvest

Sorry

Wow, it’s been a while since I posted to this blog. I was just about to get back in the saddle, after finishing the rough human draft of Captive of the Falconstar, but then things got a little crazy and I dropped the ball.

What happened? Well, I got into a minor accident where I bent the family car’s door out of shape, and that took about a week and $1500ish to solve. Our 6 month-old also came down with croup (again) and an ear infection, so that wasn’t fun—he’s much better now, though, fortunately. Classes ended for my wife, and now she has to grade a bazillion papers. And finally, we had taxes, which were so complicated this year that we found the limit of what Free Fillable Forms can and can’t do. So that was crazy.

On the writing end of things, I tried and failed to juggle four different projects at the same time, so that threw things off a ton. So instead of trying to keep that up, I decided to focus on Captive of the Falconstar and all the prewriting/outlining for The People of the Last Harvest. Both of those projects went really well, actually, and I’m back at a place where I think I can start doing some token work on the other two WIPs as well.

Basically, the plan is to cut the daily workload for Captive in half, and put off Last Harvest until Captive is done and off to the editor. At that point, I’ll turn my focus to The Soulbond and the Sling and The Soulbond and the Lady. Until then, I’ll just do token work on those two—just the minimum amount to keep my writing skills warm enough that I can hit the ground running once Captive is well and truly done.

I guess I just thought I could do all the revisions and polishing work for Captive of the Falconstar in two short weeks. I’ve done it before, for some of the Sea Mage Cycle books, but those were super short and I also didn’t have nearly as much family stuff going on at the time.

So yeah, underestimating the workload was probably what led to crashing out. But I’ve got a much better handle on it now, and I think I can finish Captive before the end of the month, even while doing token work on the other WIPs. And I also need to catch up on some publishing things, like writing and sending out another author newsletter, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. Just an hour a day should catch up with that in about a week.

As a side note, I am SUPER excited to work on The People of the Last Harvest. I’ve got all the Sudowrite fields filled out (except the outline, which won’t take long), so now all I have to do is go through and write the scene prompts to generate each chapter. Once I’ve got a rough AI draft, I plan to run it through a bunch of the Author Media Patrol Toolbox tools, like the Zeitgeist Vibe Checker, the Not A Developmental Editor, and the Roast Engine to figure out which changes to make. With that, I’ll go through and make the necessary changes to generate a better AI draft, and go from there.

Also, I should probably mention that I’m planning to attend the 2027 Novel Marketing Conference in Austin this coming January. Just bought the tickets for that. And of course, I’ll be at Writers Cantina in July, as a panelist.

The kids are screaming, so I’d better go check on that and make sure my wife isn’t too overwhelmed. Take care! I’ll start posting regularly again next week, probably.

Making good progress

It’s been a couple of weeks, so time for another quick writing update.

I’m happy to report that I’m making good progress on Captive of the Falconstar. Still just plugging away at it, refining the AI draft and steadily rewriting it to bring out my voice.

Right now, I’m about two thirds of the way done with the AI draft itself, and a quarter of the way through the human draft. If I really pushed, I could probably finish the AI draft by the first week of March, but I’m trying to spread it out in order to catch up with the human draft. Ideally, I would like to finish them both at about the same time. Right now, it’s looking like that’ll happen sometime in the end of March.

So for the next couple of weeks, I’m going to prioritize the human draft itself, and hopefully advance it up past the halfway mark. Which should actually be quite doable, even with watching the kids and only getting an hour or two each night to write.

One of the advantages of doing an AI draft first is that it makes it much easier to write when I’m tired or emotionally exhausted or otherwise just not feeling it. Instead of having to confront the blank page in such a state, I’ve already got a crappy first draft to fall back on for guidance. Sure, it’s clearly written by AI, but in some ways that actually spurs me on to write, since I can see what needs to be done to fix it.

Ironically, it’s almost like the AI is prompting me. Not exactly, since I put a lot of human input into the AI draft, from prewriting and prompt engineering down to revising the generated output into something that more closely fits my vision. Heck, I probably put more into my AI drafts than most AI slop writers (like the one recently featured in the NY Times) put into their finished, published AI-generated books. But it still makes for more efficient writing, since I’m spending less time working through writing blocks and more time just pushing it out.

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately. I’ve also got an idea for a new fantasy trilogy, but I’m going to keep that one close to my chest for the time being. After I’ve passed the 50% mark in the human draft of Captive of the Falconstar, hopefully sometime next week, I’ll start to put some work into that one, maybe even work out a rough AI draft of the first book.