April
4-23-26
It has been a minute since last I shared an update, so I will be doing so today. It is the end of the fourth month of 2026 and I have made significant progress on my latest novel. I’m not sure if I have already given it a codename yet for use here, but let’s just call it for this post Origin. Origin is something unlike my other works, set within the Gatherer’s Bounty Series, it both explores a time I have yet to explore, as well as a host of new characters and settings. Every opportunity I get to show more of Malstray is always greatly satisfying for me. There are just so many interesting people, places, and creatures out there that a single book cannot possibly even hope to scratch the surface.
I don’t keep track of exactly how much progress I make on my books as I am writing them, as very often I do not know when they are going to end, so it’s hard to give a percentage or anything like that when it comes to completion. However, as my word-count goal for Origin is on the lower side, I will say that I am comfortably sitting at around 30-40% since beginning nearly exactly three months ago today. The real overarching plot is just kicking in, and I am seeing how these early events are going to shape the rest of the narrative to come, as I hope my readers will too when they arrive where I am writing now.
A copy edit of my previous work is coming soon, and I am looking forward to polishing up that manuscript and finally seeing the mistakes I make so that I can avoid them in the future. That draft, as it sits now, is very strong in my opinion, and in my mind still holds the most potential for enticing an agent. However, it is never the actual writing of a story that I find begrudging or difficult in finishing, it is what comes after a novel has been written that I dread: the scouring for an agent. My mind stretches, my confidences deflate, and my fingers seize themselves as if made frozen by the bite of winter. I can overcome this and I will. I can see my stories sent out into the world, read, enjoyed, appreciated. It isn’t the rejections I dread, it is the time sunk in and lost searching and querying with no guarantee for anything positive coming from it. I consider my time very precious, and any time spent not writing I have tried to made sure results in something good, that I am justified in being away from my keyboard, my characters, my worlds. But what better justification could there be than getting these stories into someone else’s hands besides my own?
A haunted well’s worth of well wishes and Sadako kisses,
JMB
