Long day at work (and it isn't over yet...) but I got a few minutes at the end of workday part 1 to read over the beginning of my unfinished Tube Riders prequel. Damn. It just rocked. Gotta get back to this ASAP. I really do have issues with the amount of books that get to 30k and then stall. I have thirteen chapters done, not bad at all. In other news, I'm up to chapter 30 of 44 on Puppeteer King's second draft. Hopefully onto draft 3 by the weekend.
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Just got back from a weekend in Tokyo where among other things I gorged myself on clothing that was actually my size. First time I think I have ever bought three shirts in one go before. Gotta love H&M. Back working through plot holes on Crow 3 now. Over and out. CW Been a while since I posted any updates, but the Tales of Crow series is moving forward slowly but surely. I've finished my edits for Crow 2: The Castle of All Nightmares and it should be off for editing/proofing soon. In the meantime, I'm back writing Crow 4, which has crept up over 30k and is tentatively announcing itself as a third done. Also, the cover for Crow 4 has been commissioned. As ideas begin to circulate for Crow 5, I'm still outwardly hopeful that I'll have the full series drafted if not published by the middle of the year. It's been a while since I posted any general updates. Things have been going pretty well, but due to losing my job I had to prioritise establishing an immediate income for a while and while I've still been writing every day it's been hard to concentrate and get long spells of writing done. Things are smoothing out a little now, and progress on the latest WIP is picking up. We are also in typhoon season here in Japan so I have few reasons to leave the house. My overall target for this year was four full novels and with Crow #3: The Puppeteer King at just over 30k, I'm probably about 60k away. Should be easy.... 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 I've begun to take the first steps to get back into writing after losing my job and moving house at the end of July. For about three weeks I got almost nothing done, mostly because my head wasn't in the right place. Writer's block doesn't exist, but what I do need is routine and concentration. Thankfully the hard part is over now and I can start to get back to it. The good news is that I have two finished, edited novels with finished/almost finished covers just waiting for a last proofread. They should both be out sometime in August. Overall, writing-wise, the first half of 2014 far exceeded my expectations and I'm extremely excited about the second half. I'm confident I can double what I've achieved already, which of course starts by putting out some more awesome books. Stay tuned. Today my very first audiobook became available. This is one under my pen name of Michael White, and is a collection of cricket-themed short stories read by the brilliant Phillip J Mather. It's now available from audible.com and will soon be available on Amazon and iTunes. The audiobook for Tube Riders should be following it over the next few days. Very excited to see that one come out. In other news, it is my last day at my main high school tomorrow. Six great years. I will miss that job dearly, but this is life. I have one more day at my visit school next Tuesday and then I am set loose into the world. If you want to help feed me please buy a few books (obviously mine haha). At the moment it's just after 11pm and I am lying in bed listening to Tube Riders audio chapters on my iPhone. Did an 8am to 9pm working day, so only a few minutes here and there to get some more pages of Finding My World edited and a few more audio chapters checked. Today was my last English club at one of the two high schools I work at. We had a great time playing a game and eating snacks, then a few of us got teary as we did the goodbye speeches. Will be very sad to leave that school after five years but such is life. You have to keep looking forward, remember the good times fondly and not dwell on the bad. Positivity and all that. Just two weeks left at my day job now, before it is on to the unknown. I'm scared and excited at the same time. I have a few part time gigs lined up but nothing major. On the plus side, I will have lots more time to work on the books! The last couple of days have been pretty busy as well as baking hot, so I've not had much after hours energy left for working through the minor plot knot in the current WIP. Instead I've been doing a little revising on the love story, Finding My World. I'm on page 85 out of 198 of my Word document, and so far I've hardly changed anything. It's going great. Hoping to get it off to the editor this week. Otherwise it was a long hot day at work. Five classes at high school today. Nothing more irritating than being asked to teach a class after it's already started, but the kids were cool despite the insane heat. Followed up with a kickass band practice before our gig on Sunday. Honestly, not sure when I get time to sleep.... |