Projects for the New Year

Happy new year, humans! I’m gearing up for a year crammed full of writing projects, and I’m excited to give you all a peek at what I’ll be working on.

To start with, I’ll be spending January catching up on audio recordings that I didn’t have time to complete last year. Most importantly, I’m recording the Audible version of The Case of the Dragon-Bone Engine, which has now been out for over a year with no audio version available. I should also have time to record the audio version of “Magical Mechanics,” the second short story in this series. I don’t know how long those two projects will take, but if I have time left over before the end of the month, I’m hoping to start recording at least the first few chapters of Jubilant as well. I’ll then continue chipping away at that audiobook over the following months; starting with Jubilant, I’m hoping always to release audiobooks within nine months of publishing the text versions.

Anneliese and I are also jumping straight into the second Shallic Sea novel, Keltorax. Technically we already have a complete draft, but things have changed enough during the process of writing the first book that we’re pretty much scrapping the current manuscript and starting over. The outline hasn’t changed significantly, but the characters have developed a great deal. We’ll work on our new rough draft in bits and pieces, whenever we have a bit of spare time to write, and hopefully we’ll have a complete manuscript before the end of the year, leaving us all of next year to edit before the February 2024 publication date.

However, my big project for this year will be the second Royal Investigative Service novel, The Case of the Golden Vigilante. I have a rough outline, but I need to do a lot of polishing and rethinking before I can even start drafting. My goal is to finish the outline by the end of February and the first draft by the end of April. That should leave me plenty of time to edit throughout the rest of the year, work on the illustrations and cover art during the winter, and have the book ready for publication in February 2023. I’m also planning a (somewhat unexpected) third short story about Pretty and Denny which I’m hoping to publish this summer, filling in a little more of what the fairy kids are doing between books 1 and 2 of the main series. I don’t have a subtitle for this story yet, but the first part of the title will be “Magical Moonlighting.”

All in all, it’s going to be a rather busy year in terms of writing, but this sort of schedule is going to be the “new normal” as I move forward, since I’m eventually hoping to start publishing two books per year. We’ll see how that goes in the long term, but for now, I’ve had a good break over the past month and I’m eager to jump into the new year’s writing projects!