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!

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.