August Progress Post: The Jaguar Makes Words! Lots of Words!

Hello, Patrons! We come to the end of the summer at last! Schools are back in session, and soon the holiday shopping season will arrive. I’ve been busily at work, and as usual, here’s my monthly report on my progress so you know what I’m up to, what your coffee money is supporting, and what goodies you can expect in the future!

Writing Progress

Lots of stuff got done in August, so I resort to bullets!

• Sword Launch – First, I did Sword of the Alliance’s official launch. I know I mentioned Sword last month, when I did the bulk of the re-writing, but I did most of the marketing fluff and promotion purchasing in August, since it was officially an August release! With Sword’s launch, I’m on track so far for my planned “four books yearly,” even if the first one, in January, was nonfiction. (You can keep track of my releases on the blog with the ‘book launch’ tag.) So… good deal there! That lines me up for…
• Sediryl – …my planned October release, Sediryl’s novel, which I finished on the 29th. I wrote 34,000 words this month to finish this one off, and I’m hoping it gets shorter in edits because I’d anticipated it being a 60K novel and it’s almost 90K instead… but knowing me, it’s probably going to get longer instead. (*rolling eyes*) Nevertheless, the draft is done! I’ll do a read-through in the next couple of weeks, then ask for first-readers, so if you’re interested in Sediryl’s girl-power “origin story” and want to take a stab at proofreading it, let me know. 
• Freebies for KS, and other Shorts – In addition to finishing off Sediryl, I wrote about 14,000 words of freebies for Kickstarter (those would be the second and third shorts, “Disengage” and “Jackal Chest”), which will end up in the Princes’ Game companion volume once I’m done with all the Kickstarters. I also finished the Alysha short I was working on, which involved another 3000ish words. So, unusually for me, I spent a lot of time on shorts.
• Nonfiction – Finally, I did a lot of nonfiction this month. For Patreon (which I’ll talk about later), and for the Novelists Inc. newsletter, because they pay well and promptly and I am all about collecting paychecks. (I also like writing nonfiction because it encourages me to clarify my thoughts, so it’s good for me.) I’d call that another 6000 words.

So all in all, a productive month. I would have liked to get more done, but school started in the middle of the month and I had to put everything down to do all the assorted parental tasks required for that.

This brings us to my plans for the remainder of the year which, as usual, are subject to change.

• The Sword audiobook should be ready in September.
• Also in September, I’m planning to run the Kickstarter for the print edition of Amulet Rampant (PG3).
• Sediryl’s novel should launch in October, and I hope to get the e-book and print edition done at the same time.

I’m not anticipating publishing another book this year. I do want to start writing Sediryl’s wedding story later in fall, but I am no longer confident it will remain a novella. I couldn’t even do Reese’s first holiday on Escutcheon without it ballooning into a huge production, so expecting Sediryl's wedding not to go novel-length when it involves setting up problems that are going to carry forward into Surela's trilogy is almost certainly futile. But in addition to starting that in fall, I’ll be working on a couple of projects, one of which is obviously Kherishdar’s Exception, since I’m going to run out of “backlog” in October. The other will be preparing Coracle 1 for publication, which involves a lot of art production.

That should wrap up my writing progress and plans, so let’s move on to other stuff!

Other Progress

• Timeline Work – There comes a point in the life of every series that you have to revisit the timeline and see if it still works. While I’m good with the timeline that orders all the existing novels, it’s clear to me that the early timeline, the Peltedverse “prehistory,” so to speak, needed some revision, mostly in terms of expanding the amount of time available for events to occur, and rejiggering some of those events to match up to existing canon. This is nearly the best time to do this, because while these events have been referred to in the novels, no character has pinned them down to specific dates or causalities, which means I don’t have to worry about any of this constituting a retcon. (Obviously, the actual best time to do this is before you start writing a setting. But in fairness, I don’t think we always know that we’re going to run into things we have to change until we’re waist-deep in the work.) Anyway, coffee-cup subscribers (you folks at $5 or more) can expect a timeline post this month which I hope you will find interesting. And if you suggest something I like, or point out an error that I missed, you can expect to get named for some event or character in history. :D
• Art – Lots of doodling this month, not so much finished art, but that’s okay. My head was in a different game, so to speak, and I’m still figuring out processes for art. I did finish the art for the PG2 bookmark and a postcard, and several stickers, plus I did a lot of sketching in various places. So I’m not going to be too hard on myself for not producing several enormous, ambitious paintings. (I do have to set up to do the Sediryl cover in September, though, so there’s that to look forward to.)
• Kickstarter – Last month I ran the Kickstarter for the Prince’s Game 2 print edition, which resulted not just in that print edition (you can buy it at retailers now), but in bookmarks and 3 additional installments in the Peltedverse’s backstory… and I got fulfillment done in 13 days. This is a new speed record for me, and I’ll probably discuss it in a business post later this month. Suffice to say it went well, we had fun and got a lot accomplished, and I’m hoping to repeat the process in September for Amulet Rampant. I’d love to get all of the remaining books done this year, but I don’t love running Kickstarters during the holiday season. I’ll probably postpone any further campaigns until next year.
• Patreon – I don’t always keep track of the time I spend producing content for Patreon, but every once in a while I do an assessment, and did this month. Which is how I learned that I made 47 posts in August, and that in addition to the monthly progress and sales posts (which always run long!), I did two very long business posts, plus added the Kickstarter shorts and all the Discord-crowdsourced documents to the freebie pile (my favorite of those is the lexicon of all my alien languages, including Ai-Naidari which is crazily almost 900 words long now!).
• Etsy and Zazzle – I am still adding things to Etsy in a desultory way, as I find them. One of my plans is to come up with lots of small add-on purchases that people can bundle together with larger items to save on postage… so things like stickers and bookmarks. Buying those alone makes no economic sense when shipping is more expensive than the actual item. But tossing them in the shopping cart when you’ve already got some other stuff in there is sensible. So I’ve got that percolating in my brain. As usual, you can use this link for 10% off at Etsy, and Zazzle’s always got a million coupons here, which you can use at my store at this link.

So that was August! August was good. I’m hoping September will be even better! To wrap up, here’s the usual reminders:

Freebies Link:  These freebies were made available before I moved free stuff to the $5 tier, but I don’t believe in taking away stuff I’ve already given! So go grab these if you haven’t already! Freebies link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/link-to-all-14489113 

All Fan Chat Day: The All Fan Chat Days are not hugely attended, and I'm curious as to why that is! If there's a better time for you (or if it's just not something people are interested in), let me know. Continuing to schedule them when they're mostly used only by the regular Discord chat folks feels like a waste of effort I could be using to do something else cool for you all! I am all about maximizing your cool for the least amount of waste on my part. Everybody wins. *grin*

And that's all. As always, you all are awesome and I'm glad you're here. And your questions and comments are welcome!