2011 writing plans
It occurred to me that 2011 is almost half over. What better time to discuss my writing plans for the rest of the year?
-Finish the rough draft of “Soul of Serpents”. I think it will be anywhere between 120,000 to 150,000 words. I’m only at 51,000 words, so I’m hoping for shorter. We’ll see. “Soul of Serpents” is the sequel to Demonsouled and Soul of Tyrants, so I’m looking forward to getting it done. I’ll have a fantasy trilogy! I’m hoping to be done by August.
-After the rough draft is done, I’m going to take the second Caina book, “Ghost in the Flames”, and turn that into an ebook. I actually wrote “Ghost in the Flames” in 2007 before I wrote Child of the Ghosts, which is chronologically the first Caina novel, in 2010. So there’s been a bit of Continuity Drift that I have to fix first. Hopefully that shouldn’t take more than a few weeks, so we should have a new Caina book in August or September.
-A second edition of the $0.99 Ubuntu Beginner’s Guide. That book has done really well, and outsold all my fictional titles by an order of magnitude. So I want to produce an updated second edition to reflect some of the changes in Ubuntu 11.04, and I want to add some additional chapters on ebooks and media manipulation. (And, of course, sample chapters to my novels at the end of the book.)
-I may or may not do a short little book on the Windows command line.
-The final draft of “Soul of Serpents.” I want the book to be on sale by November – just in time for Christmas!
-Choose your own adventure.
-Author interviews for Sword & Sorceress 26.
That will fill up my writing schedule for the rest of the year, I think. And possibly then some.
As an aside, it’s interesting how my mental paradigm has shifted entirely to electronic self-publishing, whether for “Choose Your Own Adventure” or ebooks. In 2010 I seriously considered stopping writing novels entirely, but now I have an outlet. I’ve only sold a few dozen copies of each of my books (not counting the Ubuntu one), but that is so much infinitely better than waiting 12 to 24 months for a two-line form rejection from some publisher or agent.
-JM