The mess we're in

All Time's Exodus, book four in Stars of the New Gods, is taking much longer than expected.  Not that many of you are out there waiting with bated breath, but I thought it was fair.  I'm hoping to finish it by the end of the fall and hopefully have it up on Amazon by December or January.  Life has taken the front seat, and unfortunately composition is somewhere between the backseat and the trunk.  Nothing terrible, just find myself watching the hours in the day run out before I can sit down at the computer to start back up on the story.

Composition is a tricky thing for me.  Stephen King wrote a fantastic memoir about his approach to composition, simply titled On Writing.  He stresses trying to get at least 2000 words (roughly 6-10 raw pages) down everyday.  He also stresses trying to do it as fast as you can, in other words, writing at least five days a week.  The Stephen King approach has always worked for me.  Sure, it takes me about a year to turn out a book, but I feel that's pretty good considering I work a full-time job on top of that.  All Time's Exodus has strayed very far during the last year.  Sometimes there were weeks between composition sessions, and the fact that I lost a great chunk of the first draft to a faulty computer made the work pretty demoralizing.  I'm sure I've romanticized that draft in my head and it probably wasn't as great as I thought it was, but I do know I was having a very fun time writing it.  When I came to the conclusion that the many pages and chapters I pumped out with a pretty good cadence were lost, I began the demoralizing work of trying to rewrite them.  It was not fun...it was work.  Stephen King also refers to work as the "kiss of death for many writers".  I was determined and I do feel the story benefited from it, but the pace slowed and I wandered very far from what should have been straightforward composition.

I've always set a deadline for myself.  My goal has always been to start writing a book in the fall and have it ready to go up on Amazon by August or September.  It's almost August and I'm pretty sure All Time's Exodus is not going to be going up.  So, I put my chin up and work toward my new goal of a January publication, as well as a set of short stories I've started working on.

The anthology of short stories will cover the eight year gap between When The Red Moon Runs Dry and The Falling Stars.  Three stories, each one devoted to a single character.  Violetta's is my favorite so far.  Marshal and Charles will get theirs as well, and hopefully it will enrich your enjoyment of the characters despite the fact each story has little consequence on the overall Stars of the New Gods series.

That's all for now.  Hope you all stay sane throughout the fucking farce that is this upcoming election.  Donald Trump is evil.  Hillary will make a great president, and Bernie did a stupendous job bringing his issues to the Democratic convention.  I think that's about the cut and dry of it all.

So long from a very toasty Portland.