writing plans for 2013

I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions. If you want to do something big and grand, I urge you to start it now, immediately, without delay. Otherwise you’ll end up like the people in this commercial. (Ironically, I saw this commercial while running on the treadmill at the gym.)

New Year’s Resolutions aside, this is what I would like, Lord willing, to accomplish writing-wise in 2013:

-Finish the DEMONSOULED series. I’m in the final phases of SOUL OF SKULLS, which should come out in January or February. After that, there’s one book left to write – SOUL OF SWORDS. Hopefully I can get that done sometime in the summer.

-Continue THE GHOSTS series. As soon as I finish SOUL OF SKULLS, it’s time to start the  next GHOSTS book, GHOST IN THE FORGE. I’d like to have that done by the end of April, after which I want to start SOUL of SWORDS.

-Start a new series. After I finish SOUL OF SWORDS, I would like to write the first book in a new series. More thoughts on that later.

-Do a novel in THE THIRD SOUL series. I’ve been at a loss on how to continue the series, but the other night (while on the treadmill, appropriately enough) an idea came to me. I haven’t been able to figure out how to continue Rachaelis’s and Corthain’s character arcs. So the answer is to do a novel with new characters in the same setting, which would then link up with Rachaelis’s and Corthain’s plotline in the next installment. More information on this to come.

-Another GHOSTS book after GHOST IN THE FORGE. I’ll probably write that in in fall of 2013, and I haven’t decided on a title yet. I’m not sure what’s going to happen in that book, since I have to write GHOST IN THE FORGE first. 🙂

-Expand into paper books. It occurred to me in December that I had missed an opportunity by not having paper books available. People don’t buy ebooks as gifts. They buy ebooks for themselves. They do, however, buy paper books as gifts. So by 2013’s holiday season, I wanted to have at least some of my novels available in paper form. Consequently, I’ve been teaching myself CreateSpace. I suspect like ebook formatting, the first one is the hardest, and after that it’s easier because you have a template from which to work.

Anyway, those are the writing goals that will take priority in 2013. The stuff below is what I’d like to do, if there’s time:

-More short stories. I used to write a lot of short fiction, but it’s fallen by the wayside in the last few years. But my book series take place in this big rambling fictional universes, and there’s a lot of room for short stories in them. So if there’s time, I’d like to do some $0.99 short stories in the DEMONSOULED, THE GHOSTS, and THE THIRD SOUL settings.

-Additional tech books. But probably not until the second half of 2012, since I want to focus on fiction until SOUL OF SWORDS is done.

And that is what I would like to accomplish, writing-wise, in 2013.

-JM