These posts are always hard for me.
I've been trying to be a more active author, blogging and leaving messages for you guys.
The trouble is, I don't really have much to say.
"I'm writing."
That's about it. I've been working on book 3. I know I said I was going to get the book 2 paperback out first thing but to be honest... I got bored formatting. It's just nowhere near as fun as writing a new book. I literally fell asleep at the keyboard. I've heard Vellum is some good software that can automate a lot of this stuff, but it's only for Mac. I guess I finally know why writers always seem to love Mac (Fun fact; I wrote a number of words for Book 1 and 2 on a used $10 Raspberry Pi -- But don't worry, I have since purchased a real computer).
I find formatting too similar to proofreading. I love editing for story, but I can't proofread to save my life. Part of that is because I've trained myself to read very poorly edited translated xianxia novels (often machine translated and pulled directly off of Qidian) so I just don't see typos anymore. It's like I'm physically no longer capable of perceiving them, even when I read aloud. That's why I appreciate fans sending these things in. I've already pushed out several updates for Secrets of the Hearthwood with typo corrections, so if you haven't redownloaded the book recently, you have that to look forward to.
So, I've been writing book 3 instead. That's a lot more fun, and it's the whole reason I'm writing in the first place. I spent my Friday night typing away and I just reached the 10% mark in my draft. I'm further along than that in the whole process though, since the first month was getting my outline and notes in good enough shape to actually start writing the book. I'm now actually writing the book, and have high hopes of having a working draft sometime in March to hand off to beta readers. If all goes well, we might be looking at an April release. Take that with a grain of salt though. I'm still a new-ish author and I'm streamlining my process.
I'm in the process of setting up a Patreon. Several of you have asked about that. I'm not sure what I'm going to use it for, but I figure at the very least it's a nice platform for me to post stuff I don't want the whole internet to see. A lot of authors use it just to paywall their new books so the webscraper bots don't get to it but fans can still get a sneak preview of the coming story. Having your story show up anywhere on the web can give you major problems when publishing to Amazon.
That's another one of those things that I'm going to do at some point.
TLDR; I am writing book 3. I am also attempting to make other things happen, but I keep accidentally putting those things on hold to write more of book 3.
