Merry Christmas! Or, at least, a merry Christmas season to you, seeing as how Thanksgiving has passed and December has started. For me, that’s the earliest it’s acceptable to start humming Christmas tunes and setting up lights.

As I predicted last time, there wasn’t much for me to share from the week of Thanksgiving, but the following week has had some extremely interesting developments, including a weekend spent fixing a bathroom suffering from water damage. But I imagine you’re here for the book stuff, so let’s go!

The Failed Technomancer

My Christmas gift came early this year when my editor returned The Failed Technomancer with line edits a few days ahead of schedule. (I have to tell you, the people at LooseLeafEP are absolutely incredible! Very professional and prompt service, polished to a sparkle, and very friendly. And they are not afraid to tell you when something is wrong with your story, so when my editor left me a few lines of glowing praise for the work I’ve done so far, I was nearly floating.)

Now that I have the line edits in my hands, December is going to become laser-focused applying those edits and then working with a few others to do a copy edit before January. Why such a tight deadline? Well, I signed a contract to return the book to my editor in early January so it can be formatted for print and ebook in time for a February release. Hopefully I prove capable of working with this kind of deadline!

This means that writing and editing on other projects is going to be temporarily paused. Instead of sporadic word count updates, expect sporadic chapter revision updates. My goal is to apply edits to four chapters a day Monday through Friday, then hopefully get one or two done over the weekend. I’m aware this may be a tall order—especially on Mondays, where I spend most of my morning taking care of the business side of self-publishing. But high goals push me to work harder, particularly when they are high enough to be very challenging but not impossible, so I don’t plan on changing this goal.

The extra benefit of this pace is that I might be able to post a sample chapter in late December rather than sometime January 2023, so that’s fun.

Other Projects

As mentioned above, work on other projects is being temporarily halted. Inner Demons is still with the editor anyway, so that project is currently out of my hands, and Grand Odyssey will need to wait until next year before I finish the first draft. I’ve already got lots of notes of things I want to change up in the first draft anyway. (On the plotter-pantser scale, I lean heavily toward pantsing. Most of my first drafts are written quickly and energetically, then the hard work comes with pulling out the editing clubs and beating it into a reasonable shape.)

Internet Reviewers

In doing research on how to get my book “out there,” I learned that there are tons of book reviewers who welcome—sometimes even encourage—authors to reach out to them and request a book review. Many are extremely indie-friendly! Luckily, I followed a few of them already, which made my search a bit easier. I still sunk a lot of time into researching reviewers, finding contact information, and sending review requests, and a bunch have expressed interest!

Being a soon-to-be self-published author with little experience in the publishing industry prior to that, I don’t know what the etiquette is around announcing potential reviews; I’ll hold off on mentioning by name anyone who has gotten back to me unless I know that I am on their schedule. (The last thing I want to do is make anyone feel pressured if they are waiting until they are holding the book to make a decision on reviewing it.)

With that groundwork laid, it is confirmed that I’m scheduled to have The Failed Technomancer reviewed by The Nerdy Narrative in December of next year! Lezlie’s reviews are a lot of fun and you’ll learn about a ton of great books to add to your TBR if you check out her work. (I also hope she doesn’t mind if I mention that I love her accent.) If you want a solid BookTuber, check out Lezlie’s website or YouTube channel!

Here’s a semi-related story I found amusing in retrospect. The Failed Technomancer does have some graphic violence in it. (One of the main world-building elements are “robot zombies” that eat people. With that as a given, there’s going to be at least a little violence.) One reviewer asked for a content warning before she decided if she wanted to read the book or not, and I described how one character gets his finger bitten off and another gets torn to pieces. I then had a strange reflective moment of, “I wrote what? This feels like serial killer stuff.” I guess it is true that all authors are at least part psychopath—we think long and hard on how to make our characters suffer in the best ways possible.

The Interview

Remember that interview I mentioned a few weeks back? It’s happening tonight! As previously noted, the interview is going to be posted early January, but I’ll throw Colton’s YouTube channel up here again anyway. I’m very excited to talk about books and writing! Also to discover how to be a good interviewee. I’ve never been interviewed for something like this before. The interview isn’t until tonight, but I got all dressed this morning anyway out of excitement.

Closing

That is everything I have in my notes and on my mind right now! Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays… and read a bunch of good books this month! As for me, I’m hoping to finish Deadhouse Gates (a Malazan book) before December is over. That way I can start reading the first Sanderson Secret Book the moment it is shipped to me in January.

Bless up!