It feels like I blinked and December disappeared. My day job continues to keep me pretty busy although I’m mostly back to working forty hour weeks instead of the 50 hour weeks I was working for a while. We had a nice relaxed holiday weekend and I’ve gotten a lot of writing time in the last two weeks. My goal was to reach 50,000 words by the end of December and 75,000 by the end of January. I’m currently sitting at 48,000 words, so not too far off my goal. I need to have the draft of Book Two done by the end of January because I’m working with my editor in February and have to hand the draft over to her at the start of the month. So I’ll be continuing to keep up the fast writing pace for January to finish the draft on time. We’re (hopefully) going on vacation next week for ten days which will put a little bit of a wrench in my plans but I should have some down time to work on writing.
In addition to writing there have been some admin tasks I’ve been working on. The audio version of A Shift in Shadows is well underway and is on track to be released in early February. I reviewed the first 15 minutes a couple weeks ago and I can’t wait to hear the rest of it! I also finally settled on a name for Book Two. Yay! I needed to decide on a name in December because my artist is working on the cover for Book Two this month! I absolutely loved the cover Kelly Ritchie did for A Shift in Shadows so I’m working with her again for Book Two. I’ll be doing a post later this month to reveal both the title and the cover of Book Two. While coming up with a title for Book Two I also came up with a title for Book Three, lol. That will be one less thing I have to worry about later this year. I already know what Book Three is going to be about and while working on Book Two a few scenes have come to me that will work nicely in the next book. My tentative goal is to release Book Two in August and Book Three in January/February 2023 but I might be able to move that up sooner if I can Book Two wrapped up by late spring. We’ll see how January goes : )