Manuscript updates 3-25-2014

It’s been a while. I feel delinquent.

This week: another 3K added to Moro’s Shield. After over two years of legal, financial, and health stresses that made it extremely difficult to write this book, I have the plot fully sketched out, I’m happy with it, and I’m well over halfway done with the projected 70K wordcount. I revise as I go. The current finished stuff reads well, even though I know There Will Be Editing after I turn it in.

I had an epiphany on the main villain in Leopard’s Leap, and why in the Moro books we never meet any of Moro’s old arena assailants or partners. They’re all dead. But Moro didn’t kill all of them. Poor Mateo and Jace, they have more to worry about than substance abuse and a tanking entertainment career. Dum dum DUM…

2K added to Singer in Rhunshan. Another 2K or maybe 3K, and it will be done, probably around 25,000 words total. The characters are snarky, messy, tender people now, not symbols! It has actual sexual tension and sex scenes,too! Even more than ‘Saints and Heroes’ in the Cleis anthology, this will be a good intro to my Lonhra Sequence books. I have an amazing cover designer working on tying my cover art into something that looks more professional than I could manage on my own. She found/tweaked a cover font that is readable, screams ‘I am a fantasy story!’, and will go well with the other titles if I need to self-publish them.

Some people have asked about my marketing plan for Singer. There isn’t one. I’ll do a soft release when it’s ready, of the e-book version only, and set up a print version in Createspace if there’s enough interest. No Advance Reading Copies, no blog tours, no press releases, no deluge of Twitter or FB or Google+ spam. My fanfic readers, blog readers, and fellow romance loop people will get the first hints that it’s coming. Do I want it to be a success? Sure. Eventually. But it’s one of those odd little books that is probably just going to have build a word-of-mouth following.

Because I always, invariably, want to to do what I shouldn’t and what is lowest on my to-do list, I’ve been noodling with plot lines for Mask of Falling Stars, and swearing that it absolutely must be a standalone. It must. I’ll keep telling myself that.

I also had an idea for a serial-numbers-filed-off, M/M, 21st C version of A. Merritt’s The Face in the Abyss. C’mon. That scene where Graydon is shackled within reach of the Face, with only his willpower keeping him away from demonic possession, while he is lured by visions of a hellish paradise? Tell me that isn’t made for a M/M slant. And there’s nothing saying Suarra couldn’t be a prince, instead of a princess…

Dammit, there is another mms on my to-do list.

Note added 7-22-2015: Too many things to do, and not enough time. However, I’m alternating between art and writing these days, so watch this blog for some interesting announcements in the next couple of months.

Shield and Leopard are still in mms form, being added to and changed for continuity. Mask is in outline form. The Merritt pastiche keeps calling to me, wanting to be a Dieselpunk extravaganza. I will not be self-publishing Singer…not yet (that’s one of the possibly more exciting bits of news. We’ll see.)