Edits and Drafts

I am fully aware that the title is talking about book drafts and not draft beer, but I am thinking about beer at the time, and what's wrong with a little word play? Huh?

As opposed to the last couple weeks, I actually have a fair amount of things to update you on today, and that feels good. That means that things are moving forward. I like it when things are moving forward. Stagnation is the worst enemy of an author. I spent way too much time being sedentary in my writing career. I don't ever want to go back to that again.

Let's start with edits. I met my editor on Friday!!! She seems really cool, and I'm looking forward to working with her. She thinks that it will be about three weeks before she's done with the first pass of edits. The imposter syndrome is still there. I don't know how well I'm going to be able to take the suggestions and turn them into what they're going to need to be, but I'm going to do the best I can. I'm also trying to realize that the best I can do is all I can do, and that I need to learn to be happy with that.

3 weeks. That gives me 3 weeks to finish the first draft of Black Iris, my Paranormal Murder Mystery novel. Realistically it's not like if I don't finish Black Iris in the next 3 weeks that I'll never finish it, but at the same time I have a pretty good feeling that once it comes time to hop into editing mode that I'm just not going to have the time to work on Black Iris.

So I want to finish it now when I have the opportunity to. I have momentum. I don't want to lose that momentum. I probably should have been spending more time on it over the last two weeks instead of spending as much time as I have trying to work on building interest in Rediscovering Reality. Rediscovering Reality isn't even edited yet. It's a bit daft for me to already be working on trying to market it. As I get more books out there, finding out when is the right time to market and when is the right time to write is going to be something that I'm just going to have to figure out. I've still got to work my day job. So writing, marketing, and streaming are going to have to fight for my "free time."

The stream is probably going to get pushed to the side once I start editing. Sorry to the people that regularly watch me. I've signed a contract for this book. So I'm going to need to get the edits done in a timely manner. I'm not going to be able to do that if I'm spending around 9 hours a week talking to myself while I play games on stream. I don't know how long it's going to take me to get through the edits or how many rounds of edits there's going to be, but edits are definitely going to take priority over everything else if not for any other reason than the fact that I have a contract.

I'm really enjoying writing Black Iris. The tonal shift between Black Iris and Rediscovering Reality is massive. It kind of worries me in a way. I won't say that Rediscovering Reality is a cozy read by any stretch of the imagination, but compared to Black Iris it IS a cozy read. Black Iris has dark imagery and there are parts of it that are literally written to make you feel sick to your stomach. I don't know how people who are coming from Rediscovering Reality will take it.

I've decided to make a slight change to my strategy with the brewery collaboration project. Instead of reaching out to individual breweries I've started reaching out to the state brewers guilds. No one is as likely to know what breweries will be amenable to working with me on this project as the guilds, and I'm hoping I'll have more luck with it that way. I haven't had much luck yet, but I'm still holding out hope.

I have a feeling that it's going to take a while to get their attention. I'm sure in a world full of spam emails that the first emails I'm sending probably aren't even being read. It sucks. It's just the nature of things. It's hard to find a way to word a title for an email like "Potential Brewery Collab Inquiry" or "Asking For Brewery Collab Advice" without it immediate throwing red flags on being spam. So I have a feeling that I'm just going to have to be persistent. The one brewery that is probably already going to work with me is mainly because I already had a working relationship with them on Threads.

Next week will probably be another slow news week. It's going to be in the period of waiting for edits and trying to finish the first draft of Black Iris. Maybe I'll go into a little more detail about Black Iris next week. It's so completely different than anything I've ever written before, but I'm liking the first person present style of writing. I think the words flow out of me quicker that way. I'll probably use that for writing "Dirk Dashing and the 35th Universe" as well.

Spoiler. I'm writing "Dirk Dashing and the 35th Universe" next.

Anyway

Bye y'all. Hope you have a wonderful week!