August was a slow writing month between a week of vacation and the Battle for Azeroth release, but it was planned and expected to be such. I bounced around a bit on a few different writing projects, kind of putting my feelers out for what I want to work on most. I did a bit of brainstorming on Written in the Sand and Stars (formerly known as The Wizard’s Heart) and tried a new opening that I actually like quite a bit. I’m going to have to brainstorm more on how I want to approach that, but I feel pretty confident in the angle I’m taking with it. I wrote the first scene to a totally unsellable novel just to write something even if it was bad—like cleaning the creative pipes so to speak—and I wrote a couple of blog posts.

The biggest thing I did in August was launch a Patreon for my writing. That took a lot of prep-work to launch, but now it’s live, and soon, I’ll start posting weekly content there for my patrons. If you would like to show your support, you can pledge as little as $1 and get pretty graphics of excerpts from my works-in-progress, or as much as $20 and get a complete collection of my books, plus access to my first drafts as I write them. I’m excited to grow a community there, and when I reach certain dollar-per-month milestones, I’ll add more content for patrons, including monthly flash fiction and a writing podcast. If you’re interested, take a look!

Now, on to word counts…

August Word Counts:

Blog posts: 2170
Written in the Sand and Stars: 1279
D&D Portal Fantasy: 1983

Total Words for August: 5,432
Total Words for 2018: 61,531

Plans for September:

After dabbling a little bit on Written in the Sand and Stars and writing the first bit of a trash novel, I realized that I’m not quite ready to write something totally new just yet. There is so much world-building involved in writing inside a new universe, so I think I’m going to hold off on jumping into any new projects right now. Instead, I’m going to look at Rebel Engineer and start working on a revision plan for that, and then start editing. I’m going to try something a little bit different and work in passes (I usually just go in for an all-in-one editing pass and address everything at once). I have some character issues I want to tackle first, I need to beef up the technical aspects of the book, and then, the hardest thing I’ll have to deal with: I need to bulk up the plot a bit more so that it’s a full-blown novel and not stuck somewhere between a long novella and a really short novel. The last one is going to be harder because I’ll have to weave in an entirely new thread of conflict that isn’t there now, and that’s always super fun.

I talked to some author friends over the weekend and came to the realization that I just need to dig in and do the revision, despite all my misgivings about the book and its hypothetical reception once it’s published. I’ve finally come around to a point where I want to work on it (and it totally has nothing to do with the fact that I think editing it will be easier than trying to write any of my other projects… no not at all). So plans for September are to edit as much of that as I can, and if I need a break, I’ll find something else to do. I’ll be posting excerpts and behind-the-scenes notes on my Patreon throughout the month, and then, at the end of the month, I’ll be putting up a video of an edited (or new!) scene from Rebel Engineer, showing my process. (There is also a Q&A post already up for $3+ patrons, where you can ask writing/publishing/book-related questions, and I’ll answer those at the end of the month too.)

The biggest thing I’m going to work on this month is not forcing myself to work on any one thing because I think I have to, and just work on what I want to work on, even if that means not writing every day. I need to give myself permission to slow down and work at my own pace, not the pace I think I should be working at. We could all grant ourselves a little more kindness, I think.