{"id":9137,"date":"2014-03-19T11:16:37","date_gmt":"2014-03-19T18:16:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=9137"},"modified":"2014-03-19T11:21:46","modified_gmt":"2014-03-19T18:21:46","slug":"what-ive-been-up-to-lately-besides-short-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/what-ive-been-up-to-lately-besides-short-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"What I&#8217;ve been up to lately (besides short stories)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a while since I did an update post, so I figure I should do one of those to let you guys know what projects I&#8217;m working on. There are quite a few of them, and I&#8217;m happy to say that the writing is going quite well! If I don&#8217;t post on this blog very much, it&#8217;s probably because I&#8217;m busy writing.<\/p>\n<p>Anyhow, here&#8217;s what I&#8217;m working on (and what you can expect to see in the coming months):<\/p>\n<p><strong>Sons of the Starfarers<br \/>\nBook II: Comrades in Hope<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This is the project that&#8217;s been taking most of my attention. What started out as a novella has grown and morphed into a short novel&#8211;I expect it will top out at just under 40k words. I&#8217;m just past the 2\/3rds mark now, where it&#8217;s still a slog but I can just about see the end. I was hoping to finish it this week, but now it looks like I&#8217;ll be pushing it back into April.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s okay, though, because my second big project is:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Sons of the Starfarers<br \/>\nBook III: Strangers in Flight<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been itching to start this one for a while, and last night I finally opened up and started it. In the first book, <strong>Brothers in Exile,<\/strong> the two starfaring brothers Aaron and Isaac find a beautiful girl covered in henna tattoos and frozen in a cryotank on a derelict space station. In this, the third book, the girl finally wakes up and we get to see things from her point of view.<\/p>\n<p>With the way I&#8217;m writing <strong>Sons of the Starfarers,<\/strong> it&#8217;s going to be structured in a series of three book arcs. Since I want to release the books in each arc fairly close to each other, I don&#8217;t want to publish <strong>Brothers in Exile<\/strong> until <strong>Comrades in Hope<\/strong> and <strong>Strangers in Flight<\/strong> are both complete. So even if I end up taking a break from <strong>Comrades in Hope<\/strong> for a little while, if I&#8217;m working on <strong>Strangers in Flight,<\/strong> it&#8217;s not putting things off since I&#8217;d have to write that one first anyway.<\/p>\n<p>I am really, really excited about these books, and when you read them, I think you will be to. I&#8217;m trying to think of ways that I can share them, since it&#8217;s hard to talk about something if it&#8217;s not actually out there for you to read. Maybe if I posted a series of short excerpts from the first book, no longer than 400-500 words each? I generally skip over blog posts where authors sample their own books, but maybe if they were shorter excerpts, that wouldn&#8217;t be as much of a problem. What do you guys think?<\/p>\n<p>So that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m working on writing-wise. Here&#8217;s what I&#8217;m working on publishing-wise.<\/p>\n<p><strong>New Star Wanderers covers (and print editions)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>So the cover designer I&#8217;ve been working with for <strong>Star Wanderers<\/strong> told me this week that he&#8217;s overextended himself by taking on more work than he can handle and that unfortunately he has to drop some clients. That&#8217;s unfortunate but understandable&#8211;we all have limitations, and things come up in life that we can&#8217;t always plan for. We&#8217;ve parted amicably, and he&#8217;s promised to get me the files I need to pick up on the cover work where he left off.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m really anxious to get the new covers done, though, and would like to find a good cover designer as soon as I can. If you guys have any recommendations, please let me know. Ideally, I&#8217;d like to find someone who I could work with long-term, since there definitely won&#8217;t be a shortage of work anytime soon!<\/p>\n<p>Because of this, though, I&#8217;ll probably keep the original space art covers for the POD books at least for the foreseeable future. The omnibus editions will feature the new art, though, and I&#8217;ve just bartered with a friend of mine to do the typesetting for those. I&#8217;m not sure when they&#8217;ll be out, but it will probably be sometime in the late spring \/ early summer.<\/p>\n<p>As for the print edition of <strong>Star Wanderers: Deliverance (Part VIII),<\/strong> that should be out approximately whenever I get around to it, which would be sooner except that I&#8217;m so busy writing <strong>Sons of the Starfarers.<\/strong> I&#8217;m not sure how many of you are waiting on that one&#8211;the print versions for the individual novellas have been selling better than I&#8217;d expected, though still at a trickle, so that&#8217;s not quite at the top of my priorities right now.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Blogging A to Z Book<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Last year, I did the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.a-to-zchallenge.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Blogging from A to Z challenge<\/a> and had a lot of fun with it! The topic I blogged on was science fiction, with a new post each day in April starting with &#8220;A is for &#8230;&#8221; &#8220;B is for &#8230;&#8221; etc. Well, I&#8217;d like to do that again this year, but first I&#8217;d like to put together last year&#8217;s posts into an ebook. It shouldn&#8217;t take too long&#8211;probably no more than a week at the longest&#8211;so I&#8217;ll probably take care of that next week or so.<\/p>\n<p>For this year&#8217;s challenge, I&#8217;m going to blog about publishing. I already have the first few posts planned out: &#8220;A is for Amazon,&#8221; &#8220;B is for Big 6 (now 5),&#8221; &#8220;C is for Contracts,&#8221; etc. These posts aren&#8217;t meant to be advice, more just sharing my perspective and experience, since hey I&#8217;ve been indie published for 3+ years now, which might as well be 3+ decades what with the way the industry is changing. So even though there&#8217;s a lot I&#8217;m still learning, I do have a few things to share.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s just about it. Better grab some lunch now and head out to write. See you!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a while since I did an update post, so I figure I should do one of those to let you guys know what projects I&#8217;m working on. There are quite a few of them, and I&#8217;m happy to say that the writing is going quite well! If I don&#8217;t post on this blog&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/what-ive-been-up-to-lately-besides-short-stories\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">What I&#8217;ve been up to lately (besides short stories)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"What I've been up to lately (besides short stories)","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[862,898,855,857,908],"tags":[806,909,671,529,864,757],"class_list":["post-9137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ssf-i","category-ssf-ii","category-ssf","category-sw","category-ssf-iii","tag-blogging-a-to-z-challenge-2013","tag-blogging-a-to-z-challenge-2014","tag-ebook-covers","tag-indie-publishing","tag-novels-vs-novellas","tag-series","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-2nn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9137"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9140,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9137\/revisions\/9140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}