It has been an eventful month for me in terms of my writing. First, I’ve been getting a lot of feedback on Corruption of Blood, Book 3 in the Blake Heira series from my beta readers. I’ll be incorporating that starting next week, as we are at the end of National Novel Writing Month. Currently, I’m writing Casualty of Silence, which is Book 5 in the Blake Heira series. At the time of posting, I have 40,673 words written, with 50,000 by the end of the month the target. That’s actually only about half of the book, so I’ll still be writing through December to get my first draft completed. Where’s Book 4? I’m glad you asked! Arena of Night has been drafted and is waiting for me to publish Corruption of Blood in order for me to do my alpha read. Once that’s done (probably sometime in February or March), I’ll be looking for beta readers again.

In other news, I’m going to be wrapping up my series on how magic changes your setting in December. After that, I’m going to do a series on actually creating a country in a fantasy world from scratch. I’ll be creating the home for the Horselords of Shildaria. This is a country I’ve always had on my world, but strangely no one has ever played anyone from there and I’ve never run a game in the area. So, I never needed much more than an idea of who they are and what they’re about. Well, starting in January, that’ll change. I’m going to be going into my method of worldbuilding step by step in the blog.

Which leads me to my next announcement, which is that I’m going to be increasing my writing throughput, starting in 2019. Instead of putting out one novel (at best) per year, I’m going to be writing and publishing two novels per year. However, in order to fight burnout when it comes to Blake, Devik, Annika, and Shenay, I’m going to start writing a new series of fantasy novels. They’ll be set in Shildaria, the country I’m creating. I’m going to alternate between the two series, publishing a Blake Heira book in the fall and the new series in the spring.

This will mean that I’ll publish books 3, 4, 5, and the heretofore unwritten book 6 before I publish book 1 in the next series. To keep up with this publishing schedule, I’ll be drafting a Blake Heira book every May and June (it takes me about 2 months to write my first draft) and the other series every November and December (taking advantage of National Novel Writing Month).

Once I have more information on the next series, I’ll post it here and in my Books section of my website.

Speaking of my website, my final announcement is that I’ll be doing some revamping of the site once I get Corruption of Blood to my editor. This will likely be in late December or early January. I’ll still be doing my blog every Sunday, but I’m going to do some work on making it easier to navigate and promote my books a little (hopefully a lot) better. Blogging is fun, but I’m really trying to sell books. I’m hoping that this will be more than a hobby, and that means making the web site do better work for me.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate everyone who reads this. I’ll see you next Sunday when I’ll be writing about how magic changes architecture.