Joshua P. Simon - The Accidental Author

Here’s what I’ve been up to as of late.

1. Trial and Glory: Book Three in the Blood and Tears Trilogy – Got this back from all of my beta-readers with very little comments. Everyone loved it. I made one more pass through the manuscript and then sent it off to my editor a few weeks early. Unfortunately, he’s had a few unforeseen shifts in his schedule and he may not be able to start work on it until around March 17th rather than March 6th as originally planned. If this happens, I probably won’t get it published until the end of April rather than early April as I originally hoped.

2. Book 1 of new series – I wrote and made a couple of passes over what I thought was going to be the first book in my new series. However, it is only 59K+, about 20K shorter than what I was going for. I was hoping to write shorter books with this series in order to release them faster but this is pretty short for a fantasy novel. Also, the ending is a little unique from what I’ve written before. So, I had my wife read the book. She liked it a lot, but agreed that the ending might either need to be reworked a bit or it might make more sense to combine the first and the second book into one. Unfortunately, this could mean a much longer first book than I wanted to write.

Anyway, I’ll know for sure what to do (including whether to rework the ending of Book 1) after writing what was originally proposed to be Book 2.

3. Book 2 of new series – In light of the above, I’m about 21K+ along in my first draft. Since it is still really rough and evolving as I write it, I can’t say much about it other than it’s moving forward. Since I’ll be juggling edits on Trial and Glory as well as a couple of writing projects, I might not be able to get this ready for Leah to read until May.

I guess we’ll see.

4. Sorta secret project – I hinted I had something going on I wasn’t quite ready to talk about a month and a half ago. I’m still not there yet. However, I will say that progress is moving along and I hope to announce it in more detail on my blog at some point in the next few weeks.

I’ve had a few hiccups as of late with work (taking on new responsibilities as well as someone under me leaving) and health (flare up with my Crohn’s) that have made writing more difficult. However, I don’t believe any of them will cause progress to halt completely on the above.

That’s it for now. If you’re a writer, hopefully your projects are moving along as well.