The Notebook

Not Dead I Promise

I admit, I got a little busy over the summer. I went full-time at work, still working on the barn, started school in September, all the fun stuff. But I’m also a bit lazy and, as I said somewhere at the beginning of this endeavor, it’s hard for me to keep track of something that only comes up once a month whose success rate is dubious at best.

 

Old Business

Let’s see...my last newsletter was July...huh. Apparently I promised some deleted scenes. Well, that obviously hasn’t happened yet. I can’t say when it will happen either. Hey, be glad I remembered to do a newsletter this month.

 

And...I said that The Eleventh Hour (The Chivalrous Welshman #10/F) was going to come out next summer as planned with Bearer of Bad News (The Akari-Bearer #1) this December.

 

So, about that. In my writing schedule, I like to give at least 30 days between editing and publishing, just to give myself enough time to fix any minute errors that I might have missed during the bulk editing and revision. Well, quite frankly, it’s October and I’m not finished yet. I’m going to be gone for 10 days, which isn’t going to help anything. Then it’ll be just about November, which won’t be nearly enough time to finish the draft, edit with any meaningful results, and publish, to say nothing of the formatting and graphics that have to go along with it.

 

From that, I am going to have to make the decision to either swap the two books as originally thought, bring The Eleventh Hour up to a December release with Bearer of Bad News set to release next July, or just push Bearer of Bad News to a possible March release and keep everything else as planned, The Eleventh Hour in July and The Fifth Horseman #1 (no title release yet) next December. I am also going to have to make this decision very quickly, preferably before we leave.

 

New Business

No real new business to speak of. Bearer of Bad News is almost finished but not quite. It’s folly to think I’m going to finish before we leave, but before the end of the month isn’t...too far out there I guess.

 

But we’re going on a safari in Botswana for a week for our tenth anniversary, so that will be nice.

 

Fun Factoid

Stopwatch (The Chivalrous Welshman #4) was structured and partially written as an off-ramp for The Chivalrous Welshman. Basically, if, by that point, I got bored with the series and didn’t want to continue, at least there would be some sort of ending. Would there be a lot of unanswered questions? Yes. Would readers be left with a tragic cliffhanger in the middle of the action with no way to know if Rifun and the others had been defeated? No.

 

I played around with several different endings, unsure how to proceed. It wasn’t that I was bored with the series so much as I didn’t want to lose momentum without blowing things out of proportion, leaving me with ultimately nowhere to go. It wasn’t until I actually started writing Free Time (The Chivalrous Welshman #5) that I figured out how I wanted to end Stopwatch and keep the series going. And it wasn’t until I finished The Hands of Time series that I discovered how The Chivalrous Welshman was going to end.

 

Other News

Somehow I have survived my first month back to school in ten years. Three online classes and one in-person class, and the one in-person class could honestly be an online class. It’s all basically pretty chill.

 

If anyone wants a laugh, English is so far my worst subject. This has to do with the difference between creative writing and academic writing. I remember most of my MLA stuff, never really learned APA, don’t give a shit about either really. A+ for content, C- for the bells and whistles. Also getting really tired of reading “serious” articles—written professionally for large publications, not some random blog post—that serve no purpose other than as a self-esteem boost. There is nothing structural to be gained, no actual recommendations for improvement, just a little sarcastic, self-loathing cheerleading.

 

So here is my recommendation: if you want to seriously write about how you write, with the full intent of helping others improve their writing, actually write about you writing and your writing. Unless your daily routine is pertinent to how you write articles, fiction, nonfiction, whatever, keep it out. I don’t care how you like your coffee. Please refer to my “World Building” series on Bitchute if you’d like some examples on how to help. If you prefer to use humor and sarcasm to make a point, try “Terrible Writing Advice” on Youtube or Nebula. Or anything other than some random article from The New Yorker.