Back in the Saddle Again

For anyone who's still following me -- almost doubtful after all this time -- I have begun writing again after a time of depressing writer's block.

I want to complete the other two Not With A Whimper novels and get them out before the end of the year. In September I wrote the equivalent of a novel, completing the first draft of Not With A Whimper: Preservers. I had thought it would be similar in length to the other two (about 65k words), but it kept getting longer and longer and the first draft ended up at 93k words.

I'm now pushing hard to get the other one, Not With A Whimper: Survivors, completed in first draft. It's already at 82k and with what I know I have left, looks to be my longest novel to date.

Because of the dating -- all four novels take place concurrently -- and the fact that characters from some novels appear in other novels, I'm waiting until I complete the first draft of Survivors before I try to publish Preservers. These two were the hardest to separate, and I need to be very careful of my timing.

I'm hoping for a November release date for Preservers, and a December date for Survivors. And then, at last, I can get back to Colleen Yrden's story, which I've pretty much put on a back burner for a couple of years. I have approximately 30k words written in the third novel, "One Trade Too Many", and I'd like to finish that up, too.

Anyway, I'll be so happy to see the last of Not With A Whimper. Right now, all told, the four books together are about 1000 print pages (303k words), and when I started it, I figured it for maybe 120k words (about 400 pages).

So, I'm back -- in case anyone is still out there.

Live the joy, people.