More like snowdrops. It’s snowed here the last couple of days. Nothing heavy. It’s not sticking, but it’s darned cold for May. Just sayin’.

Cape Grace is slimmer now than it started with in April. I couldn’t make it work so I started stripping it down until I had stuff that belonged. It’s better now but the real work is only just beginning. I’m not saying this book is cursed … but I think this book is cursed.

In better news, I’ve seen the mockups of the new Shaman Tales covers and I’m really liking what I’m seeing. In theory I’ll have them by the time the book is ready so I can recover South Coast the same time I’m publishing Cape Grace.

Fingers crossed on that.

By Darkness Forged is waiting in the wings. Still. Forlorn as ever.

For those who haven’t heard, the Smuggler’s Tales are on Podium’s schedule for a September, 2019, release on Audible.

We’ve had our share of rain the last few days. My lawn loves it but between the weather and – honestly – lack of energy, my walking schedule has been ragged.

News:

I spent four days of writing with the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers. The goal was to get 25k words in four days. That’s right. Half a NaNoWriMo in 4 days instead of two weeks. That’s 6250 words a day for a four day weekend. I made the count and then some but I’ve been trying to straighten out the story ever since.

The good news is that Cape Grace is just over 100,000 words and I have almost all the pieces. The bad news is that they’re not even close to being in the right order. I’ll get there, but I did myself no favors in constructing this plate of pasta.

By Darkness Forged should be available on Audible tomorrow, April 2. It’s up for preorder now. The paperback is still on my To Do List.

Podium has assigned a narrator for the Seeker’s Tales – Emily Woo Zeller. You can hear a sample for one of her recent books Minimum Wage Magic.

Speaking of NaNo, Camp NaNo starts today. A few of my RMFW buddies and I will be working toward another hair on fire month. I’m going to try to write another novel this month while I’m still working on ironing out this one. I’m behind on my goals but there’s still time.

And speaking of goals, I’ve set a goal to write every day this year. I missed a day in January and few days in February, but this month I’ve written every day and produced 41,231 new words.

That’s it for this month.

Safe Voyage.

The last couple of weeks have been rough. I haven’t done my morning walk as regularly as I’d like. I haven’t got as much progress on any of the projects as I wanted. Worst – or best, depending on your point of view – I got smacked by a clue-by-four at a conference I attended early last week.

Status first…

By Darkness Forged is still not available in paper. I’m still working through the process.

On the upside, Cape Grace is shaping up. It’s slow. There are too many moving parts in my current manuscript. I’m trying to sort and shuffle, patch and fill. It takes time and attention I’m having trouble marshaling.

Also, I signed with Podium to produce the Smugglers Tales in audio. The casting director was at the Smarter Artists Summit and I put a pitch in for a woman’s voice. She was open to the idea. I doubled down with the author liaison afterwards. I’ll let you know when they tell me release dates.

Speaking of audio, ICYMI By Darkness Forged is scheduled for an April 2 release on Audible.

The clue-by-four …

“You are not your audience.”

Sigh. Yeah. Intellectually, I know that it’s madness to generalize to a population based on personal biases. Apparently, that knowledge never informed my actual practice. Luckily, it’s not too late to change.

If you noticed, my mailing link widget at the top right is gone. That’s because I’ve learned that I’m making a couple of serious errors with the processing of addresses and the way I’m handling that function. I learned about it from Tammi Labrecque, Newsletter Ninja, at the Summit

It was one of those lightning striking moments and I’m still sizzling a little. The upshot is that I’m resetting my list and migrating to a new platform. I’ll be emailing a monthly newsletter on the 15th to complement this first-of-the-month post. It’ll have a status report update, probably a book recommendation, and maybe a question for you as I try to sort through what else I might do with it.

While this is all happening, I’ve enabled the new sign-up on the side bar. You can sign up right now even if you already signed up at the old service. This will be better.

[ETA: If you’re already signed up, that box should disappear and you’ll never have to see it again. In theory.]

And if that’s not enough …

I’m re-examining my policy on “zero advertising.” Discovering that I’m completely 180-degrees out of sync with reality on newsletters has me examining this other aspect of the business. None of you are likely to notice, but don’t be surprised if you run across an ad featuring one of my books sometime in the next year.

Other than that? I’m still shooting to write every day. I’ve missed six days this month because – apparently – the habit has not been sufficiently set to survive the rigors of travel. My total word count for the year is only a bit over 20k, but I expect that will expand when I get done fighting with Cape Grace and start a new book that has fewer constraints on where it can go.

That’s it for now. Safe voyage!