Looking Forward
As the new year begins, I am technically all caught up with The Plan. For those of you unaware of The Plan, it was to release a book every other year, and a short story in the between years. As of 2017, I'm all caught up- two books and two short stories have been released, although I did cheat a little- The Eightfold Lairs of Xillenthia was supposed to be released in 2015, and instead was published in 2016, along with the planned short story, A Murderess Most Fair. So, what's next? According to The Plan, I should be releasing another book this year, which is Tale of the Witche, a sort of prequel to Tale of the Moone, although I will admit it is unlikely to be published on time. When I originally wrote Tale of the Witche, it was a problem story. I've found that there are three types of stories- ones that come relatively easy, like The Eightfold Lairs of Xillenthia (rare), ones that require some effort like Tale of the Moone (the most common), and the problem stories, those that fight you nearly every step of the way, and which I only continued to stubbornly write because I had already put so much effort into it. I don't have many problem stories, but Tale of the Witche was one of them. It's also not terribly efficient to focus solely on one story, at least not for me. Although I combat writer's block by working on several at any one time, whenever I've had a book in preparation for publishing I've dropped everything to work on said book. However, when I ran way over my self-imposed deadline with TELoX, I put aside many short stories I wanted to write. So while I will certainly work on Tale of the Witche, I will also be taking time to finish book 8, pick up the threads of those short stories, and begin a few new longer stories.
