April Progress Report: Traveling Far (Little by Little)

April was busy! Mostly Day Hobby busy, but for those of you who missed the announcement, my last day there is in June! I am looking forward to freeing up those mental cycles. In the mean-time, though… let’s talk about what I was up to in April, and therefore, what you can look forward to soon!

Writing Progress

With Dreamstorm done (and launched!) last month, I turned my attention to other projects. Coracle, as my main aim, doubled in size; I estimate that project should be done by the end of May/beginning of June, unless it keeps spawning scenes not in my outline (*eyes it severely*). Also, Sediryl jumped from 8000 words to 15000 as my side-project. I even managed some work on Kherishdar’s Exception, though it’s idling while I finish the other two pushes. 

Here this month (and gone again next) is the short story “Healing Waters,” which I wrote as a Kickstarter stretch-goal gift. For those of you who aren’t participating in the Kickstarter, you can get that bonus in one of two ways: if you’ve bought “Family,” Book 5 of Dreamhealers, then ping your retailer at the end of May for the new edition, which includes it; or wait until the end of May and I’ll post it on Patreon as a freebie for the $5+ coffee cup tier. 

Many thanks to my enthusiastic Kickstarter backers, who not only got us that $5000 stretch goal, but banded together to make the Dreamhealers KS the most successful I’ve done: at $6400, it just beat out the next highest grossing KS in my roster, Black Blossom ($6221).

Writing-wise, I’m still on schedule for all my Q2 goals. We’re in good shape! If all continues as planned, you’ll have a new Pelted book (Sediryl’s “origin story” novel) and Coracle 1 by the end of the summer, to go with the Kherishdar serial.

Just a reminder: Coffee cup patrons are able to read Coracle now, serialized, in advance of its publication. The Kherishdar serial will be available for everyone to read.

Other Stuff

April was much used up with Kickstarter activities and administrivia, but that’s good: within a couple of weeks, the remaining Dreamhealers books (Dreamhearth, Dreamstorm, and Family) will be available for sale as paperbacks at retailers, which is a thing many people have been asking for! I’ve also been handling a lot of extra tasks involving ebook box sets for Princes’ Game and the Jokka audiobooks (the Bloom audiobook will begin serializing here on Patreon at the end of this month). I haven’t gotten as much accomplished as I wanted (see: Day Hobby suddenly exploding), but I’m satisfied that we’re still moving forward, and that I’ll soon be less distracted.

In art news, I got new sketchbooks I really love, and I’m enjoying drawing on them immensely. About a week and a half of my drawing time got knocked down for assorted reasons, but I’m piecing myself back together and getting back to it. For those of you who asked, here's a link to the new sketchbooks with amazing paper: https://www.strathmoreartist.com/vision/vision-mixed-media.html

Several people on the Discord server ordered one based on my recommendation and agree that it’s spiff.

In Patreon news, we gained three new people! Welcome, new folks! I won’t call you out because that’s often embarrassing, but we’re glad to have you. The Discord server is also doing some re-organizing, based on its increasing size… we’re discussing scheduling events, like a weekly book club talk, or kitchen cooking chat, or a monthly ‘let’s all make something based on a theme’ day. Once we’ve got that organized, I’ll post the monthly schedules here so people can decide what they’d like to attend. I know the server’s now large enough that it can be daunting to just show up and figure out what’s going on! Hopefully having the events will make that less of a problem.

Finally, the monthly reminders. First, All Fan Chat Day is tentatively scheduled for Friday the 18th! I will be drawing, and there will be Q&A and silliness. Join us, we'd love to see you! And as always, a link for all the freebies. 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!  https://www.patreon.com/posts/link-to-all-14489113 

As always, questions and observations welcome. Y'all are the bestest. <3