Progress Report: February 2023
Sick again, reading a lot, and making progress on Librarian.
Well, I suppose it was inevitable, but after 2 months of staying healthy in the middle of cold & flu season, my kid and I both got brutally sick again. There are a few different levels of sickness when it comes to kids: too sick to go to school, but overflowing with energy and still needing a lot of interaction and attention; sick enough to lay comatose on the couch and fade in and out of sleep; and too sick to play, not sick enough to zone out enough for dad to sneak in some work, and feeling miserable enough that she doesn’t want to be alone. This bout of illness started off with version 1 but rapidly degenerated into version 3. Basically, I’ve been tearing through books while she spends half the day watching her way through the 1992 TV show based on The Little Mermaid. I’m not going to do a full reading re-cap, but highlights from the last week and a bit of sick reading have been Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo1, Stealing Mona Lisa by Carson Morton, Real Life by Brandon Taylor2, Babel by RF Kuang3, and Fairy Tale by Stephen King.
That said, I’ve been squeezing in what work I can in the evenings after the hobbit finally goes to bed.
The Traveling Librarian
The first revision of The Traveling Librarian is just shy of halfway done. The next newsletter will be an in-depth look at exactly what kind of work is being done during this revision4, but for now, suffice it to say that it’s been quite slow going. Librarian is not my only obligation, and there were a number of elements in the first half of the draft that required significant world-building efforts to flesh out. You know, all those things I dismissed during the first draft with a, “Eh, I’ll figure out how that works later.”
I hesitate to estimate when this and the subsequent clean-up revision will be done, but I’m trying very hard to finish it before the current Whisper of the Wilding Woods sequence wraps up.
Whisper of the Wilding Woods
As of last Thursday, we’re up to Chapter 5 of WotWW. That’s 26,000 words (roughly 80 paperback pages) with another 6,000-word chapter coming up in a couple of days! How are you enjoying it so far? This is my first time publishing anything as a serial, and though I’m enjoying the process, it’s not always easy making time to get the latest chapter out on time. Last week I had to rearrange my entire schedule and set my kid up with some Disney+ while she was home sick so I could grab the couple of hours I needed to get it ready to go.
I should also admit, I’m not much of a serial reader. I’ve read a couple in the past, but generally, I prefer to read all in one go if possible. What about you?
Everything Else
I can’t get into this in too much detail, but to give you an idea of what I’m juggling these days, here’s everything I’m working on right now, in order of priority:
The Traveling Librarian revisions.
Whisper of the Wilding Woods serialization.
Epic fantasy client commission that’s currently paying the bills.
Pen name publications that are also helping pay the bills.
Secret magic realism literary-ish project about a guitar player.
1 and 2 are self-explanatory, and I can’t betray client confidentiality to talk about 3. I’m also going to claim client confidentiality on 4, though the client is me. I like having entirely separate publishing identities with no ties to my real name, so that one’s just going to stay private. I only mention it here because it eats up some of my time when I decide to write new work for that ongoing series5.
But I can talk a little bit about item 5 on that list. I made a very conscious decision to choose indie publishing over the traditional model, but in recent years I’ve had a few ideas for books that simply wouldn’t work well in the indie marketplace. I don’t have space in this post to get into why that is, but this book is one of those stories that would find a better home with a traditional publisher. That’s why I haven’t been working on it regularly, even though it’s an idea I’m really excited about. Until now, I suppose. I don’t particularly enjoy the revision process, and the way things have stacked up, I’ve got a lot of it on my schedule for the next couple of months. Since I can’t manage productive revision work when I’m exhausted at the end of the day, I decided to use that time to indulge in a bit of first-draft writing on a project that may not get published until 2025 or later depending on how long it takes me to get it cleaned up enough to begin pitching agents. If it gets published at all. The book still has some fantastical elements, but as a music book, it’s far closer to David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue than Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles. I think it’s the kind of thing a good percent of you will enjoy reading, but I likely won’t talk about it here until I have a better idea of where it’s going to find a publishing home. Right now it’s a me-time project that lets me be playful and creative while mired in revisions, but it’s not something that’s stealing time from any of my other projects.
Hopefully all of you out there in reader-land are staying healthy. And if not, hopefully you’ve got a good book to keep you company!
-mark
Sequels are hard, but this is a great follow-up to Ninth House.
This book is beautifully written but covers some difficult territory (abuse, sexual violence) that may not be suited to all readers.
I particularly enjoyed the philological digressions that slow the book down quite a bit and probably turned a lot of readers off. Though, I did stop reading the footnotes about a third of the way through the book. And yes, I’m aware of the irony in grumbling about footnotes within a footnote.
I’d originally thought to do that in this update, but it’s not a short post and this progress report got a bit long on its own.
I’m not talking about Alexis Blakely and the Black Records here. That’s not a pseudonym I’ve ever tried to keep private.