When I started this blog my initial plan was a post every two (three?) weeks. Last month I did a post every week and it made me realize why I chose two(ish) weeks initially. Because gal-darn-it, I just don’t have that much to say right now–or rather, much that anybody is likely interested in. At least not yet.

I’ve got a notepad full of topics I could blog about, but for now it’s more important to generate content via books, than it is via blog posts. So I took a little break and I’m going to scale back on blogging to the original biweekly schedule as I focus on writing book 2.

With book 1 being finished, I’ve recently taken a serious look at elevator pitches. In the past, whenever somebody has asked me what my book is about I’ve just stared at them dumbly while my mouth blubbered about “genre”, “plot”, and “characters.” So I sat down and put some honest effort into coming up with some shorter pitches and I think I’ve got a strong, working one sentence pitch for Eisengrau. I found some great advice online that helped me to focus my work into a single, concise evocative sentence that I think transmits a good portion of what my book is about: A woman with anxiety must defeat a fear-empowered creature to save the child she nannies.

It’s not perfect maybe, and I don’t claim to be an expert on this, but I think it’s perfectly serviceable. I leaned quite a bit on the information I found on a reddit thread and you should definitely check it out: https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/5e5ml3/how_to_write_a_great_story_pitch/

With that said, I’m going to hopefully be sending my manuscript to my friend Chris this week. I’ve mentioned Chris before, he is the author of the Chaos Queen cycle, an epic fantasy series that he’s getting close to releasing book 4 (out of 5) for. If he likes it, he’ll pass it on to his agent, and then from there… well hopefully good things happen. If his agent doesn’t want to take it on, I’d love to get a referral to another. This is always the hard part for me, regardless of what I’m doing–the networking. It’s the kind of thing my wife excels at and something I need to be better about.

I want to start looking into submitting to agents as well, which is its own process, so perhaps more updates on that in future.

As for book 2, I’m about halfway through my rough draft of book 2. This is the most exhausting part of the writing process for me–that creative free writing. In a way it’s liberating, because you have the world at your finger tips and you can do anything, but it’s also a daunting process for that same reason. You can do literally anything in your story, and it’s your job to make sure you don’t screw it up. Things like structure and rules help keep your focus narrowed, but that doesn’t necessarily make the process of putting your story onto paper any easier.

With that being said, it is going much quicker than book 1 did, which I think is a natural progression. I started rolling ideas for Eisengrau around my head probably about eight years ago, though I would say the majority of the work was done in about two. I’d like to have Penumbra done in less than one. We’ll see if I can make that happen.

I’ve started reading Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal recently. It’s not the type of novel I would generally be interested in, regency romance is more my wife’s cup of tea. I bought it for her a couple of years ago and I figured it would be a good chance to stretch my legs a little bit and dip out of my typical genre. So far I’m quite impressed by a lot of the little things that Kowal does well–to the point where it’s inspired an idea for a potential YouTube series where I take a chapter of published books and give a critical analysis on them, breaking down things I like and don’t like. After a quick peek around YouTube this doesn’t seem to be something that anybody is really doing, or at least, I couldn’t find any channels that are. Something to consider working on…