So, about January.

Yeah. That didn’t work out as well as it might have.

Bad news first: The paperback for By Darkness Forged languished in my “Oh, yeah. I should do that” pile all month.

Good news: My goal of writing every day failed only once. The net is just under 11,000 words for the month. While that’s normally two days worth of drafting for me, a heck of a lot of the month was spent sorting through the various drafts of Cape Grace to find the pieces I wanted to keep and to scope out the bits that are missing.

Think Frankenstein’s monster but the monster is a novel and the body parts I’m stitching together come from five different takes on the story.

Yeah. It’s as ugly as it sounds – particularly when you consider that a couple of those drafts go back to 2010.

But I have a plan, an outline for what needs to go into the story, and I’m filling in the slots. Fingers crossed.

Podium is – apparently – on track for the audio for By Darkness Forged, but in all honesty, I haven’t seen any news from them so … who knows?

I’ll be in Austin later this month at the Smarter Artists Summit, assuming I can get airline tickets.

See you in March.

My goal for last year was four novels. I only published three. I think that’s the most I’ve been able to do in a single year since 2007 so it was definitely a more productive year.

I also produced the paperback copies of the five outstanding books and I’m working in getting By Darkness Forged brought up to paper, too. That should happen by the end of this month.

I have Cape Grace in my word processor and I’ve spent a couple of hours on it this morning. It’s not pretty. I’ve started and stopped this story so many times I can’t remember what’s in this draft, what I threw out, what might have changed from the opening to the current last page. It’s going to take me some time to figure out where this book is going.

Next in line:
I’m going back to the Tanyth Fairport universe, but shifting continents to Sudenlan for a trilogy about a guy who gets traded to a barbarian tribe as hostage for salt. It’ll be a sort of sword and sorcery story. I have no idea where it’s going, but it’s been percolating for a year now.

Coming in audio:
By Darkness Forged has gone to Podium for Jeff Kafer to read. It’ll likely be March before that comes out of the Podium pipeline.

Ravenwood is overdue in my inbox, but all three books should come out in relatively short order. Word is that they’ve been recorded but are in post-production hell.

Sorry, the Smuggler’s Tales aren’t in production yet. I’m waiting to see what happens with the Tanyth books before I decide where to put those stories.

Thanks for coming along for the ride with me over the years. This month marks the twelfth anniversary since I sat down to write “Call me Ishmael.”

Here’s hoping I can do it for at least another twelve.