It takes only the briefest of scrolling to see that I haven’t made much use of this blog over the last……. six years. But my writing career – and I use that term very loosely – has chugged along without it.
The fourth Daganu book, The Long Dark, is out via Smashwords, but is not yet published on Amazon. I’ll be getting to that within the next few months. The fifth Daganu book, The Spell Builders is ready to format for publishing, and on tap for this year’s National Novel Writing Month (known affectionately as NaNoWriMo, or more informally, Nano) is a sixth. The Spell Builders is narrated by Ko and is primarily set in pre-history. The sixth book – working title The Unicorn Portal – goes back to Joe as narrator and picks up some few weeks after the end of The Long Dark. I’ve tried a sixth book more than once, but I do think it will stick this time, and I’m really looking forward to writing it!
I have two other fantasy novels in editing that are not Daganu books:
Unbreaking will probably come out next year. The book starts in 2018, but immediately leaves this universe, so the date becomes irrelevant. Unbreaking is my longest novel, and there are other things about it that make it unique to me, but either are spoilers or would be boring shop-talk to most.
The Beeherders was last year’s Nano project, and I only finished the draft a few months ago. That one is set in 2020 in the San Francisco Bay Area – specifically the East Bay. There was a major technical challenge in the way that story is constructed, and it felt good to see it come together and work. It was kind of a trip to write a book set during the pandemic… And we didn’t even have a vaccine when I started that draft! On the other hand, we also hadn’t been through that absolute hell of a winter surge.
So that’s where we are today. One book in formatting, two books in editing, and one in the planning stage. I have a number of non-fiction blog pieces I want to write, but I won’t tackle them until after Nano. Submissions for Fastlane will not be emphasized during Nano, but will be written as the muse moves me. (The muse also drives a Jeep.)