So, 2023 was a huge year for me. In late March I released The Orc Knight's Daughter, followed by my first novel in the Tales of Shattered Zemyah series, The Artificer and the Genie. Both stories have been well-received, with The Artificer and the Genie getting an overall 4.4 stars on Amazon with thirty reviews.
I haven't lit the world on fire with sales just yet, but it has done better than anything else I've written on my other pen names, and I expect sales to pick up once I've released more books in the series.
Speaking of which, I've been hard at work on the sequels. I had a bit of a setback with the slice-of-life side novel Amazon Holiday. Writing back-to-back sex scenes proved to be a lot more exhausting than I'd anticipated, and the book took me twice as long to write than what I'd planned for. However, I was able to push through and finish the first draft by the start of October.
I spent the rest of October doing planning and pre-production on the true sequel in the series, Slaves to the Worm God, to kick off writing for NaNoWriMo 2023. I finished the fifty-thousand word goal without much stress, and I've been having a ton of fun doing it. On The Artificer and the Genie, I plotted out the story just thinking of what might be fun to happen next, and sort of discovered Zain's character arc as I was writing the final battle with the pirates. But for this new novel, I decided to craft the story by thinking about overall character arcs for as many characters as I could, and the results have been so rewarding. I think you guys are going to have a blast with the book once it's finished.
I've also had no difficulties maintaining my word-count goals of thirty thousand a month, minimum--even while I was on vacation visiting relatives. I'm estimating that the new novel will probably end up being about two hundred thousand words long, compared to The Artificer and the Genie's one hundred fifty thousand. At that rate I expect to finish the first draft sometime in late April or early May, and then I'll need to take time editing, revising, formatting the books for print and ebook, and creating the covers. I've just recently hired a new artist for the two covers, and I'm really looking forward to seeing the results.
Hope everyone's 2024 plans go great. I'll be back when I have more news.
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