Hoo boy, do I feel wrecked. The day job's been pretty intense, and things aren't letting up anytime soon. My writing time continues to be sacrosanct, though, and the early morning weekend hours are forever fixed as MY time. So I'm now halfway through The Dubious Commode, and I'm beginning to feel bummed out over the second half of the book because this is it for the Ghosts and Tea collection. It's hard to let go when the time comes, and I went through that before with Masks, but it's inevitable. I've also sworn off series books after this, and I'm looking forward to nothing but standalone books once The Dubious Commode is finally published.
I'm looking at moving the release date -- obviously going back on my resolve not to mess with the calendar again, but I've been flying high since the start of the year, at least where my writing's concerned. The day job's another matter entirely, but for my creative life, I'm having a blast and am enjoying a surge of unexpected energy. Not to mention a more positive outlook. I think it's got everything to do with the end of Ghosts and Tea and a future of long novella standalone books. As much as I love Ghosts and Tea (and it's hands down my favorite series to work on), I'm really looking forward to a freer creative time with everything under the Grotesqueries umbrella.
Voices in the Briars is all but completely written down by hand in my notebook. I've got so many detailed outlines and notes for that book that I might as well get started on it -- strike while the iron's hot, blah blah blah -- but I need to pull back from that. It's extremely, extremely tempting, and I tend to forget the physical exhaustion I put up with at my full-time job when the weekend rolls around, and all my attention's fixed on my writing. Maybe once I'm down to the last ten chapters of The Dubious Commode, I'll test the waters and see if I can manage half a page at a time or something. The concern I have is losing that spark of inspiration if I continue to hold off (or if I hold off too long), so maybe a bit of an overlap in writing schedules will keep that fire burning.
I'll be talking more about the next book soon as there's a lot I want to share (call it pre-writing buzz / marketing).
I've also messed around with the calendar, and if you were to check out my Book List page, you'll see the minor tweak I did. It basically shows that I decided to bump The Perfect Rochester up and place it after Voices in the Briars and not after Compline. I think waiting a year for another dip into the world of primordial gods and the Nightshade family is the maximum length of time for me to wait for a related book to be published.
The Book List page also details the books' categories with The Bells of St. Mark's Eve being another dark comedy. It didn't start out like that, but as the book will be dealing with family -- or the relationship between a young man and his devout grandmother -- I figured a dark comedy would be a much better fit than the usual serious tone that's expected from a gothic horror book. Everything past this year doesn't have a date attached to it yet since things will always be mutable (in spite of my wish for a more relaxed and spaced out schedule). As always, how things play out this year will influence the calendar for the years following, so I might end up publishing three long novellas this year and next.
And so onward and upward, and I'll be back to talk more about the next book and other stuff.
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