It’s been a crazy week. On Tuesday, I had a minor accident with the family car, where I tried to step out while the car was in reverse, and the front door impacted a wall and got bent out of shape. So that threw off the whole day, and put us out more than a grand, which is why I haven’t gotten back to blogging daily. But hopefully that will change as I catch up on things.

Right now, I’m juggling three WIPs, which is a little crazy. Fortunately, two of them are in the same series/world, which makes it a little easier, but not by much.

I was hoping to finish this WIP completely by the end of the week, but now that’s obviously not going to happen. With my wife busy finishing up her classes for the semester, leaving me to watch the kids most of the day, it’s realistically going to take the rest of the month to finish this book. Which is fine, but a little frustrating.

First, I need to finish the revised human draft. I’m currently in chapter 2 out of 12, but if I push I can probably finish that next week. Then, I need to do a final polish, cutting the word count down by about 10%. That might take longer, but it will probably require less brainspace, since it’s mostly just looking for unnecessary words and cutting them.

This book is currently up for preorder, so it needs to get done soon enough that I can send it out to my editor for a copy edit. It is set to release in July, which gives me three months, but the sooner it’s done, the better. For that reason, this book needs to be my priority.

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This is a quick cover mock-up I made for The Soulbond and the Sling using ChatGPT. I will probably make this a J.M. Wight book, but it’s good enough for now. Definitely captures the tone and genre.

I’m working on the rough human draft for this one, which is probably going to be the most difficult draft. My hope is to finish it by June, leaving another month to do the revision draft and the final polish. So far, it’s going well, but juggling this one with the other projects is starting to get a little difficult.

I’m going to be on the Blasters and Blades podcast soon, talking about this new series, so I want to get the first four chapters to a state where I can put them into a sample excerpt, hopefully before the end of the month. That way, people who hear the podcast (or find out about it in other ways) can download the sample and sign up for my email list to be informed when the full book comes out.

I am very excited for this book, and hopeful that it will turn out well! The AI draft is already done, so I just need to translate that into the actual human draft and make it shine.

I’m also working on the AI draft for The Soulbond and the Lady, book 2 of the series, though this is a much lower priority. Basically, I’m doing just enough to keep my AI writing skills honed, and when I start the human draft of this book, after finishing The Soulbond and the Sling, I’ll focus more on finishing the AI draft for this one. But I am very excited to finish this WIP as well, since I hope to release the first three books in this series all at roughly the same time. So the sooner I can finish this one, the soon I can publish the first book.

As if that’s not enough, I’m also working on an outline for another fantasy trilogy, which I hope to generate in Sudowrite before the end of the month. Gotta use those credits before I lose them. But that’s more of a fun side project at this point—something to do after the work has been done on everything else.

At some point, I’m probably going to drop the ball on one of these WIPs. That, or I’ll put everything else on hold to finish Captive of the Falconstar, but I don’t want to do that until I have a good stretch of time and know that I can finish it quickly. In the meantime, I’m backed up on all of the regular publishing tasks, which is why I haven’t posted a new short story for the Vasicek Free Library for this month yet, but that’s coming soon. And hopefully I can get caught up on this blog too.