Hello, September! Ok, it’s ten days into my birth month (Happy Birthday, to me!), but things have been a bit busy as of late.
After taking my daughter up to college at the end of August, my attention had shifted to Fantasy Football. I take my fantasy team (Meat Popsicles, thankyouverymuch) very seriously. Our draft was on Monday of this week, and I’d spent a fair bit of time preparing for it. It was a blast, and my top secret software (not really a secret) projects me the winner! Ok, ok. It predicts me the winner every year, and last year it would have been right if I hadn’t made a few bonehead roster moves throughout the season. But, I digress…
So, now that I’m relatively distraction free, it’s time to regain my focus on writing. The last quantifiable project I worked on was Perplexia, A Crystal Medallion Story. It was my August’s newsletter story, which was read by hundreds of my subscribers for free. Since then, I’ve been bouncing around on various writing projects: namely, September’s untitled Newsletter story, A Wool (Hugh Howey) short story that will be included in an upcoming Chronicles anthology, and Shifted Realities (a Linear Shift sequel).
After I had finished The Hunted Assassin back in May, I had planned on diving right into Shifted Realities, but life has a funny way of side tracking life. My wife Cheryl had a stroke in mid-May which derailed my time devotion for the next novel. So, instead, I shifted gears and decided to slow down that process and work on some short-term focus projects instead. Hence, the reintroduction of the monthly short story! It’s all good, though. Really, it is. Cheryl’s doing much better now.
If you’ve been following my writing for any amount of time, you’d know that the Newsletter short stories were going on back in 2014, and then were combined into an anthology in July of that year. I had plans to continue that process in 2015, and then again in 2016, but my focus drifted to novel writing instead. It’s kind of tough doing both, and working a day job at the same time. So, the Newsletter short stories got shelved. Only after writing two more (still unpublished) in early 2015. They were titled Departure and Hunter/Hunted. My goal was to write six shorts and combine them with the first part of Borrowed Souls for my next anthology.
So, with all that said, a new Anthology is in the works! I’ll combine those two 2015 shorts, along with four from this year and publish in December. Perplexia was in August, and the remaining three (September, October, and November) have yet to be titled, but all have been started. The Anthology is planned for a December 27th publication, but you can read the stories as they come out each month. Naturally, you’d need to be subscribed to my newsletter to do so. So, what are you waiting for? Click HERE and subscribe today!
That brings up my next project. The Wool Chronicles! I was invited to write a new short story for this anthology a few months back, and after a fair bit of back and forth with Amazon, it’s actually going to happen! My story is in the early planning stages, and should have a first draft ready to go in about a month.
Finally, there’s Shifted Realities. I’ve completed the outline and am working (slowly) through chapter summaries. There’s a bit of a twist to this novel – there’s a story within the story – that’s proving to be a bit of a challenge. It’s going to be awesome, but it’s like I have to write two separate stories, and then intertwine them into a single, cohesive novel. If I’m successful, it will be an awesome tale. Fingers crossed!