Just taking a minute for a quick update. The third and fourth Steam and Steel Chronicles novellas are currently with my beta reader. She’s usually really quick with notes for me, so I may start with revisions on them later this week. Still no idea what the titles will be, but I’ll post here when I come up with them.

I’m working on an urban fantasy novel I started last year. I had about 25,000 words done on it, mostly just bits and pieces of scenes. And then I got distracted with other things and dropped it, though always with the intention to go back and finish it. So I’m going to try to finish it soon. It will be the start of a loose series I’m working on, with books all set in the same world, and possibly with some reoccurring characters. I have one other book planned for sure, but it’s going to be a big world, so there will be a lot of room for new stories in the future. Read the rest of this entry »

Here in the U.S., today is Thanksgiving. I’m taking a rare day off of work (I even went so far as to close my email program) and hosting Thanksgiving dinner for my husband’s family and my father. We haven’t hosted a family dinner at our house in a number of years, so it’s a nice change. And a lot less stressful than the first year we hosted Thanksgiving for twelve or thirteen people less than two weeks after we bought our house. That was quite the holiday!

So today I’m spending time cooking and writing whenever I can. My NaNoWriMo word count stands just shy of 39,000 words at the moment, and I’m hoping to push it up over 42,000 today. That will put me slightly ahead. I’m working on book four at the moment. Book three came in at around 32,000 words, though that will probably decrease during editing.

There are a lot of loose ends from the first two books that I’m tying up in the third and fourth books. I left a lot of things open-ended because I knew this was going to be a series, and I’ve had some negative feedback due to some of those things. But I promise that all of it will be tied up one way or another, and pretty much all of it will be explained in one way or another.

Book four is going to be the most adventurous book of the series, and will bring us back to some of the same places we went in book one. Characters that first appeared in books two and three will become vital parts of the resolution to the series (even if they only had cameos in earlier books).

Writing a series is a completely different animal than a stand-alone novel. Especially when they’re being written a year apart. There’s a lot to keep track of, and I think with the next series I’m planning, I’ll spend some time putting together a story bible to keep track of everything.

I guess I should spill the beans on the next series I’m planning. I was going to take some time to work on a gothic romance novel (a complete overhaul of part of a very early novel I wrote, the same one that Steam and Steel was inspired by) after I finished Steam and Steel, but now I’m thinking I’m going to write another steampunk series instead. The working title (and I’ll be coming up with something better before it’s done) is Clockwork Colony. It’s steampunk set in an entirely different world than The Steam and Steel Chronicles, and will take place in India around 1910. It’s going to require a lot more research than other books I’ve tackled, but I’m really excited about it.

This series won’t be a continuous series like Steam and Steel, but instead will be a number of books loosely set in the same world. This means I can write in that world when I want to, and when I have a story to tell, but I’ll have the flexibility to write other things in between, without worrying about alienating fans of the series. I’ll likely start working on this one in December. We’ll see.

Anyway, happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the US, and happy Thursday to everyone else!

This is just a quick post to let  everyone know that I’ve added an excerpt from the first chapter of Aboard the Unstoppable Aerostat Fenris under the “Fiction Excerpts” page in the main navigation (under “Steampunk Novella”, cause the full title doesn’t fit on one line). Or you can just click here to get to it. It’s the first scene, which makes up half of the first chapter.

The novella is now completely formatted, and I’m just waiting on the artwork for the cover. My husband is doing a digital painting of part of one of the scenes (I’m not so good at digital painting, so I’m leaving that part of the design up to him). We collaborated on what the image would include, and I’ll likely be doing the text layout and such for the cover (though he keeps trying to convince me to let him do it; this is what happens when designers are married to each other).

I spent a bit of time today formatting the ebook for Kindle. I’ve still got to do the formatting for epub and Smashwords, which I’ll do over the next few days. If all goes well, the book will be out on Kindle, Nook, and Smashwords by the end of this week. Stay tuned!