And I thought I was busy before...

This week I released Tales of Crow #1: They Came Out After Dark, a story that was originally intended to be a standalone horror in the style of Richard Laymon, but which ended up more of a techno-thriller and part of a new series that may go as far as five or six books. I put aside the current projects I was working on to get it done, and after taking a "break" by writing a love story/mystery, I then completed Tales of Crow #2: The Castle of All Nightmares at the beginning of August. I'm now writing ToC#3 while trying to keep up with all the other ongoing projects.

Which are:

Getting a ton of my short stories, collections, novellas etc available on other formats via Draft2Digital. This is something I've been meaning to get to for a long time, but I'm a complete computer illiterate and while Amazon wonderfully allows you to just upload Word documents, for D2D to work well you have to use ePubs. Very simple for someone who knows what they're doing, but when I started out in self-publishing I didn't even know what a hyperlink was. After a bit of research I worked out how to make and upload an ePub, and so now I'm doing a couple of short stories per day.


Getting Finding My World (the aforementioned love/mystery story) edited and out. No one buys my standalone novels so they're very much a labour of love, but it's a great story so anyone who reads it will get a big reward for their time.


Getting The Castle of All Nightmares edited and out. Like Tube Riders before it, the Tales of Crow series won't really do anything until there are at least three books out. Because these are mostly standalone stories features some ongoing characters and plot elements, they're a lot easier to write than Tube Riders, which had a necessary story arc that I had to stick to. They're also a lot shorter.


Get Tales of Crow #3 finished. I'm mostly unemployed at the moment, having lost my job at the end of July. While I'm doing evening work, my mornings are mostly free to write now so I'm looking to increase my output. I've already written 335,000 words this year and I want to clear 500,000 at the very minimum. This should see the third ToC book done (hopefully by October) and perhaps a fourth book to follow. Alternatively this could open up the schedule to get back to


The Rise of the Governor. Yes, it's part written. Is it any good? I don't know. It's hard to write, that's for sure, and I've done a ton of research on the hundred or so pages that I have written. Will I get it done? Hell yeah. Revenge was only released in January, so I'm not exactly in George RR Martin timeframes yet.

And what else?

Lots. I recently conceived a little project I'm currently calling Chris Ward's World of Words. I'll let you know more about it soon.


Right, these are words that need to be done on the next book, so enjoy They Came Out After Dark and I'll speak to you again soon!


Chris Ward
August 20th 2014