January Patreon Update

It's 2022. I'm still in shock, as it doesn't really feel like a year passed, but it is what it is.

Heretic Spellblade 4 is out, if you somehow missed it. The response to it and the pre-order have shattered my expectations, although I'm expecting it to be a very spikey release. For Messengers, the commentary is up.

Otherwise, January will be a busy month for me. I'll break this post up into news and then a general update on how I feel the year will play out.

• Demon's Throne 3 chapters will start in the 2nd half of Jan. As I'm still in planning stages, I don't know much will be posted. I don't have an ETA on the book, obviously.
• The Kadria short story will be posted for Messengers by next weekend.
• I hit a stumbling block with the Cyberpunk story, which has me going back over the outline and thinking of other story ideas (as I'm now planning rather than writing, and I want to write). A little more on this later.

For 2022, my main goal is less about trying to pump out lots of books and more about getting a consistent schedule down. I'd also like to experiment with some more interesting series ideas - I love fantasy, but I have multiple sci-fi/cyberpunk/dystopia ideas that aren't trendy/marketable but that I want to work on.

Honestly, I have far more ideas than time to write. Not to mention how easy it is to come up with ideas that don't make good books when I sit down and spend time on them. Many drafts have gone nowhere.

In terms of a rough guideline, I want to publish six more books this year, on top of Spellblade 4. Those will likely be (in approximate order):

• Demon's Throne 3
• Empire Reforged 3
• Heretic Spellblade 5
• Dystopian Billions 1 (if I fix my shit)
• Demon's Throne 4
• Heretic Spellblade 6

That's fairly ambitious compared to last year, but I've been working on Empire for the last year, and plan on writing Billions between books. So, really, it's the same pace as last year with extra books between them.

While I have ideas for other stuff to work on, they're mostly that: ideas. My priority is solidifying my schedule. I'm unlikely to ever reach a point of releasing books like clockwork, but more consistency will give me an actual buffer.

Anyway, let's talk about that issue with Billions very briefly.

There's a disconnect between different levels of the story. I typically break up my story ideas into glue and meat, with the meat being something like "Nathan goes back in time with his enemy to change history, with lots of politics and intrigue" and the glue is "he controls Champions, fights demons, and builds castles." There's more to it, but that's the gist of it.

In Billions, the glue isn't holding together. If I can't fix it quickly enough, I might write a Messenger post about it. The idea for this story has stuck in my head and come back to me repeatedly, so I refuse to let it go.

But so have a couple of other ideas. Over drinks, a friend annoyed me about another cyberpunk idea I dropped last year: one that involved androids, android harems, chips in everyone's heads, and a dystopian society where AI, companies, and government collided. I always described it as Psycho Pass meets Girls Frontline.

There are others, as there always are, but as I've said before, I'm always tinkering away at random stories between books. It's part of what I do in my downtime between books. I'll try not to post any unless I'm certain they'll turn into something, which is why I'll solve the issue with Billions.

Anyway, until next month.