If you’ve been checking in here regularly, you’ve probably noticed two things.<\/p>\n
1.) I haven’t been posting chapters of\u00a0Thirteen Swords.<\/em><\/p>\n 2.) I still haven’t been posting chapters of Thirteen Swords<\/i>.<\/p>\n Largely, this is due to\u00a0Destiny’s Heir<\/em>.<\/p>\n I’ve been participating in a writing mentorship with Joe Nassise for the past two months. It has been an excellent experience and has given me more confidence in my writing than I’ve ever had before, in a professional sense. He has been reading\u00a0Destiny’s Heir<\/em> in sections, and we’ve been spending a fair amount of time dissecting and polishing my work.<\/p>\n The fact that a professional author said he enjoys my work has been great for confidence.<\/p>\n The downside to all this has been, quite simply, I’ve been focusing all my writing energies on\u00a0Destiny’s Heir<\/em>. Given that I work 40 hours a week and spend another 10 hours commuting, and I like to spend some time with my wonderful wife, and I always have plenty to do during a given week (last two weeks included sausage-making and tearing down my furnace to fix it), I have definite limits on the time I can spend hunched over a keyboard typing like a madman.<\/p>\n However, I finished writing\u00a0Destiny’s Heir<\/em> on Saturday.<\/p>\n That’s right, it’s finished!<\/p>\n My wonderful wife then devoted ten hours or so of her life to reading and critiquing\u00a0Destiny’s Heir<\/em>, resulting in a manuscript with lots of marks on each page. It’s great being married to an English teacher–she edited for grammar, for spelling, for style, and for story consistency. Have I mentioned I love my wife?<\/p>\n All that said, I now have a 1 1\/2″ binder sitting on the table with corrections I need to apply to\u00a0Destiny’s Heir<\/em>. It’s probably a couple nights of work, and shouldn’t be too painful. And after that, I’m free to start writing again.<\/p>\n As I’m sitting here writing on my lunch break, I’m sketching out story ideas in my head. Some of them revolve around the as-of-yet-unnamed sequel to\u00a0Destiny’s Heir<\/em>. Others revolve around\u00a0Thirteen Swords<\/em>, which I’ve already outlined once but didn’t like the result.<\/p>\n After finishing\u00a0Siege<\/em>, I felt a bit burned out. Frankly, I was emotionally drained from saying goodbye to a large number of characters and friends. I was physically tired from the time I’d put in to wrap the story up the way I wanted. I literally lost sleep thinking about that damned story while I was working on it.<\/p>\n After finishing\u00a0Destiny’s Heir<\/em>, however, I’m not feeling that burnout. I’m taking a few days away from serious writing to relax and recuperate, but I’m very much on a writer’s high–satisfaction, pride, and hope are all intermixed.<\/p>\n Even though I missed the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest (as they closed due to hitting the maximum number of submissions), I’m feeling great about writing.<\/p>\n So, what’s next? (Besides extensive editing)<\/p>\n I’m leaning towards\u00a0Thirteen Swords<\/em> right now, just for the change in pace. While\u00a0Destiny’s Heir<\/em> was written with the idea of a book series,\u00a0Thirteen Swords<\/em> is intended to be wholly stand-alone. Unusual for me, I don’t even have a spark in the mind’s eye about what a sequel would look like.<\/p>\n And yes, if\u00a0Thirteen Swords<\/em> is my next project, it will still be posted here on WritingUnderDuress. After all, I need to have some way to drive traffic, don’t I?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you’ve been checking in here regularly, you’ve probably noticed two things. 1.) I haven’t been posting chapters of\u00a0Thirteen Swords. 2.) I still haven’t been posting chapters of Thirteen Swords. Largely, this is due to\u00a0Destiny’s Heir. I’ve been participating in … Continue reading