Several News Items

Geez, it’s been over a month since I last made a post here, except for the members’ monthly short story post anyway. Some things to catch you all up on, because I left it unsaid here.

So let’s get to it.

The Great Challenge

Total success! I turned in story #52 to Dean last month, making it officially 52 stories in 52 weeks.

Though in reality it was more like 54 or 55 stories, since a couple weeks I did two, for reasons.

So yeah, total win and I feel great about it.

Now comes the grindy part. Many of those stories have been making the submission rounds to various professional publications. Hopefully at least a few will get picked up. But if they don’t, I’ll be getting them out to everyone to read on my own. I’d really like to do a collection of all 52, called Stories From The Great Challenge. Gotta wait until all submissions results are in for that, though.

In the meantime, I’ll be putting together collections of ten – I started that last fall with Short Mystery 10-Pack. Now I’ll have four more to do, at least.

The submission and publication process has its enjoyable parts. But it is more of a grind than simply writing them. Hell, I’ve still got several earlier stories that aren’t out into the world for that reason.

So this will take a while.

Still, super awesome challenge results!

The Kickstarter

You know I did the Kickstarter to raise funds for an audiobook of Out-Dweller (Glimmer Vale Chronicles #2). It funded, as I think I announced here before. And since then my narrator has been busily working on the recording. About half of the chapters are done. I’ve done a couple proof listens of the completed chapters already and caught a few errors, which have been corrected.

And of course wouldn’t you know it, but his narration found a typo in the written book that somehow made it through the multiple proofreads that I and others did before it was published.

*sigh*

That’s fixed, too. Will be inserting the corrected files into the various distribution channels this weekend.

So yeah, recording’s going well.

I’ve also shipped the physical book rewards that people signed up for on the Kickstarter. Digital rewards have not gone out yet, because in the Great Challenge I wrote a couple more Glimmer Vale short stories than I had before, one of them during the Kickstarter. So that means I need more covers for those new shorts before I send the digital rewards out, since some of the reward tiers include the GV short stories. My cover guy gave me an initial draft the other day; I need to get back to him with notes, and we’ll finalize the covers. Should be done in just a couple days.

Then it’ll just be a wait for the audiobook recording to get finished, probably by the end of the month.

In all, the Kickstarter was another total win. Learned a lot, got the audiobook I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. And had a bunch of fun.

Life And Stuff

Those are the primary news items I have for you. The rest of what’s going on has been fairly mundane; as mundane as possible with all the weirdness going on the world lately.

As you might expect, I have some strong feelings and opinions on this Covid thing. But I’m not going to go into that here; at least not in this post. Suffice it to say I haven’t minded staying home one bit.

You mean I get to not go anywhere, and just work from home? I’m there!

But…

Frankly, I lost – more like threw away – a lot of writing time in the last month because of paying more attention to news and events than I normally do, and because I sunk myself into video games. One in particular, Pathfinder: Kingmaker. I’ve been wanting to get that game for a long time, and I got a copy as a Kickstarter reward for backing its sequel.

The other day I looked at my Steam account stats and realized, “Holy smokes, I’ve spent 180 hours on Pathfinder….in like a month and a half.”

That’s horrendous, like full time job horrendous. And I wondered why I didn’t get much writing done.

So this week I’ve cut WAY back on that. As in, I’ve not played it at all. And lo and behold, I’ve actually gotten writing business stuff done.

Shocker.

Ok. That’s all for now. This has already gone longer than I intended.

Hope everyone’s doing well. I’ll be back again when there’s more news to share. Until then, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!