Progress Report: May 2022
Remember last time when I told you the Munchkin was hit with a fever and a nasty flu that ate into a few days of my usual writing time? Well, a week after that update she came home from school and went rapidly downhill, eventually throwing up and hitting a fever of 39.8ºC (103.6ºF). She had a few rough nights that had me waking up every hour or so to deal with the aftermath of what we’re fairly certain were norovirus symptoms, and she wasn’t able to eat more than a bite or two of jello for four days. She was so weak she couldn’t do anything but lay on the couch for a week. Then she shifted into more of your standard cough and runny nose, which were bad enough she had to miss a second week of school.
Then I got sick.
So yeah, it was a less than productive month. I did manage to make some progress though, and in the middle of all that illness, I was able to publish The Seventh Moonrise Most Profound here
, which I was happy to see many of you download as an ebook. I hope you enjoyed it, and I plan to publish short stories here as regularly as I can in the coming months.Beyond dealing with illness for what felt like most of the past month, it doesn’t seem like I had time for much of anything else, but Vancouver seems to have finally warmed up and stopped raining long enough for the Munchkin and I to bike to school instead of riding the bus, which is a much better way to start the day. I’m hoping this nicer weather also brings a reprieve from all the cold and flu bugs ripping through the school system now that masks are no longer mandatory in the classrooms. I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on, and I really want to get these new books out to you as soon as possible!
Progress Report
Saber and Stone [20% Revised]
What work I did manage to get done this past month was on the first Braelorne Academy book. I’ve already made quite a few tweaks in the opening chapters, though upon re-reading and assessing the overall plot and character arcs, I’m quite happy with the general flow of the novel. That means I won’t have to do any crazy cutting and rewriting of entire subplots or chapters, though I may squeeze a few new chapters in here and there to flesh out a few things that could use more attention.
Even though this book is narrated from the close point of view of the main character, Finn Holloway, books like this tend to have a fairly large cast by virtue of being set in a magic school with a couple hundred other students. Obviously I can’t give each of those students equal time, but there are a few characters that could be brought forward a little more. Revisions are always an interesting challenge, but I’m already quite happy with the first draft material, so hopefully I can continue to find ways to elevate the prose, characters, and plot as I work through these edits.
All this illness has set me back a bit, but I’m hoping to get this book published around the middle of July, depending on how long it takes my beta readers to get back to me.
Untitled Short Story [Planned]
Sometime in the next couple of weeks I’m going to block out a few days to power through a short story for the newsletter. I’ve got a couple ideas in my head, but I’m leaning towards one about an assistant cook in a royal kitchen who’s sent out on the morning of an important feast to retrieve a rare ingredient, only to get caught up in a series of favors that must be done before his source will hand over the integral component of the main dish. This story will be shorter than Seventh Moonrise, but will probably clock in somewhere between 20 and 30 pages.
The plan is to send this out as a single newsletter post by the end of June, and it will be free to all subscribers.
The Traveling Librarian [Awaiting Revision]
I haven’t done any work on this book since finishing the first draft last month, but I’m itching to get back to it and have been thinking a lot about how to really bring out the cozy/backpack fantasy vibes I was aiming for when I first conceived of the project. I’ve also been thinking a lot about the next book in the series, which I’ll start drafting as soon as I get both Saber and Stone and this book fully edited and published.
Estimated publication date is late August or early September.
That’s all for now! There’s a chance I wont send out a newsletter next week, since I’ll be busy trying to catch up from all the time I lost last month. If you haven’t read it yet, The Seventh Moonrise Most Profound is available to read free now. Also, come say hello and tell us what you’re reading in the first Common Room post!
Until next time, I’ll see you among the stacks.
Mark Feenstra
In a previous progress report I had mentioned the possibility of an audio version of this story, but given the health issues I’ve been dealing with, I wasn’t able to get anything recorded, and am still not feeling quite well enough to do a decent job of it. It’s my hope I can still create a recording at some point in the future, but for now my focus has to be on making up lost ground with novel revisions.