I haven’t blogged here in a while, or done anything at all here, as it turns out. I’ve been busy. I’ve been refocusing…thinking about where I want to go with my writing right now. I have a lot of stories going all at once. I really want to focus on finishing them. Nightfire will continue monthly. I’ve had #10 finished for some time, but I am still without cover art. Once I have that, it will go up.
This month, I’ll write Nightfire #11 and start working with the publisher on Metrognomes. After this, my focus will be “Metrognomes II.” Then I’ll finally get to work on “Cry, Wolf II, III, and IV”. I feel I should finish the Daniel Mason story first, because I’ve really moved past it as an artist. I’m not in that dark place anymore creatively. I want to have fun. I’m more in a Metrognomes place. Still, I can’t leave the tale untold. When I first started writing Cry, Wolf, I didn’t see it as a series. The outline, to me, was a complete story. As I neared the end of the novel, however, I realized my imagination wanted to keep going. In fact, before I’d finished it, the story of what happened next had already cemented itself in my imagination. I still didn’t think I would write the sequels, but I stuck things in there just in case. Things like Julius, who showed up at the end of the book without any real explanation. I figured if I wrote the sequel story, Julius had to already be there somewhere in the background, or it wouldn’t work right. So I stuck him in there at the risk of never explaining him and letting it look like I’d made an error in storytelling by introducing a character who serves no purpose at the end of the book.
My point is, now I know the story isn’t finished. I have to write the rest of it, before I move too far away from it. So after the second Metrognomes novel, my goal will be to finish the Daniel Mason “quadrilogy.” Then I’ll write the last three Metrognomes novels. That should clear up some room in my brain for all of the other stories I have to tell.
I have several short stories that I want to write still, a twelve-part series of science-fiction novels, a detective series set in the Nightfire universe that will be made up of both novels and short stories, not to mention all that I have planned for The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas and all that I don’t have planned for The Penny Dreadful, which has been pushed back to September (again due to cover art).
I feel that finishing some of the big stories I’ve already begun is necessary before I start writing all of these new ones, in order to keep myself from getting spread out too thin. In the meantime, I feel there are enough short stories posted on the site already that visitors can get a good idea of my writing style(s). And new stories will be going up, just not on a regular schedule. I’ll write them as time permits while I’m working on finishing the tales I’ve begun.