Friday, October 30, 2015

A Short Update (3)

The last writing update was posted in May so it was just about time for another one. What did I do all summer? Well, I'm proud to report I've been pretty productive. Before you ask, no, the second book in The Stolen Wings series isn't finished yet. I worked on it a little, but it wasn't my main focus.

So, what did I do? Let's see... I wrote a dragon story that was picked to be published in Galileo magazine. I also have a sci fi time travel story scheduled to appear in the next issue of Paradox magazine, and The Singularity magazine accepted my fantasy time travel story. I'm doing well on the publishing front this year with 13 submissions, 5 acceptances, and no rejection so far. The Romanian translation of The Nightingale Circus is ready, but I haven't heard back from the publisher yet.

I wrote two more stories for Romanian anthologies scheduled to be released next year. One of them was supposed to be a circus story. When I finished it, however, it didn't fit the theme that well, and since I didn't want to tweak it more, I wrote something else. It was an old idea which I never quite finished shaping as a story before so that's fine. Don't jump up and down, I'm not ready to release the circus story yet. I plan to submit it to a few English magazines first and see how it goes. I'm not holding my breath, though, because while it's a good story and I think it works as a standalone, the editors might not agree with me since it's set in the Broken People universe. If nothing comes out of it, you'll get it in the spring.

The other thing I'm proud of is finishing three installments in the Law and Crucible saga. They include  a prequel, a novella, and a short story and they will all be released together in December. More details will be posted on the blog, starting with next week, so watch this space. I can't wait for you to meet Law and his crew!

Having crossed all these off my to-do list and not planning to write anything new for the rest of the year, it means that, yes, I have two whole months to finish The Stolen Wings book 2. Happy now? You're welcome! I'm not really doing the NaNo-thing, but it will still be sort of a NaNo since I'll be working on the same thing and have a daily writing quota. Heh, if I were doing the NaNo, book 2 would be finished in a month. I don't know if I can be done with it before Christmas, but it's okay if it stretches into January. I don't want to stress myself and I want to fully enjoy the writing process because, you see, this is the part that makes me want to write and publish books. Rewriting, editing, formatting, publishing, and marketing are also part of the job, they're things that need to be done, but they're not the part that makes want to be a writer. So I better enjoy it when I can.

At this point, it doesn't look like I'll have time for another story in The Devil You Know series, but if I get bored or stuck, I might surprise you. The thing is, the total word count by the end of the year will be high enough to cover three novels, and that's good enough for me. So, of course, the goal next year will be to have three novels published. The plan is to release book 2 in The Stolen Wings series, book 3 in Broken People series, and a new sci fi novel that is 90% plotted already, but we'll talk more about this in 2016! :)

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