January Progress, and News

As usual, we’re back to round-up posts! Where I let you know that I'm not sitting on my tail all month. *grin* This one is project-related; I’ll do sales discussion in a separate post. For now, though, let’s have a look at what got done, fueled in part by your buying me coffee every month!

Writing Progress

As usual, my method is to pick one project and concentrate on it until it’s done, which gives me a book every three months or so. The first, in this case, is Dreamhearth, so that’s the one that gets incremented daily. If I have brain left over, I put some work into Kherishdar’s backlog, which is why that’s also going up. I think Kherishdar was at about 6000 when the month started—Dreamhearth was at all of 1200, barely started! So we’re doing well there! Coracle is also up on the board, since as soon as I’m done with one thing or another, it’s going to start going up.

The end of the year I’ll pick a final project, and it will either be Earthrise 2 or a new YA series book in the Peltedverse. *tips hat to Discord Chat citizens, who helped her brainstorm that* I’m excited about both of those, so we’ll see. That gives me my schedule going into 2019: continue with Coracle, and two new Peltedverse series.

I’m waffling on Sword of the Alliance, which might need a substantial rewrite to fly. Rewriting books doesn’t take as long as writing them, but I’d like to redo the Alysha series covers and see if they start selling better before I put any more time into it. I'm leaning toward 'yes it's worth it' because even my least good Peltedverse series sells better than almost everything else. We'll see how much time I have left over.

Other Projects

This year I wanted to do more art, and I appear to be tumbling into that, if not in the intended way. I’ve got a couple of games sketched out that I’d like to do, one physical (a collector’s card game) and one online (my Peltedverse paper doll), so I’ve been preparing material for those projects. I like the gear-switching that goes on when I move from writing to drawing… it’s healthy for me, I think. So while this might be the way I prefer doing art (which is painting on paper), it’s still better than not arting at all! Plus… games. Games are fun!

In addition, I’m planning to start streaming the digital art stuff, so I’ll be posting about that in the coming weeks. I've set up my twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/mcahogarth

I mentioned in my newsletter that one of my big pushes for the year is rounding out all my offerings in print and audio, which is going to entail a lot of Kickstarters. The first KS is launching next week to do the print and audio editions of Either Side of the Strand. I’d hop on board that if you want the original cover with my art! Since as I mentioned, I’d like to redo those. I posted my first take at the bookmark, and I'm refining it every day or so.

I fixed Taylitha's face which was super-bothering me. I have internal metrics for what these characters look like, and while they can be 10-15% off they need to be within tolerances. >.>

I'm also currently working on the print edition for the Three Jaguars book. Which is... such a big project that I'm starting now for something that needs to debut in three months. -_-

News

Here’s where I note that I suspect the Day Hobby is costing me money. I had a chat with my boss and have reduced my days-worked by another day to see if I’m right. This is part of what’s freeing me up to run those extra Kickstarters! So we’ll see if I've read the trend correctly (that the more time I spend on my own endeavors, the more I make).

Needless to say this is... sort of wonderful? Exciting? I dance! Less time spent in a concrete closet and more time spent doing stuff you guys will enjoy, and that I like making. Is great partnership. Life is good. *beams*

Oh, and before I forget: All Fan Chat Day is February 16th! Mark your calendars!

And a final reminder, for new people: Here's a link to all the Patreon freebies so far. Lots of short stories and coloring pages to download! Go get them!

That's the project round-up for January. Next week, we'll get sales numbers, and I can talk about how you all have doing the equivalent of saving your favorite TV series from cancellation. >.>