Five Great Days

I can honestly say that the last few days have been some of the most amazing of my life. I'd half-expected Admiralty to not sell at all – certainly I was figuring on a slow burn, that it was a marathon rather than a sprint. I was telling myself to keep my expectations low rather than be disappointed. Disappointed? I was exultant, with fifty-one sales by the end of last month, over just three days – and as of writing this, I'm on seventy-two. That people are downloading and reading my book seems like such an enormous privilege that I am hard-pressed to believe it is actually happening. I still haven't cured myself of checking the stats, I'm afraid; I'm attempting to get into good habits, there, but so far, I'm failing.

Certainly, it is making writing the third book a lot easier. I managed a really good start on what will this time really be 'Not One Step Back', I swear! (That was the first cover I commissioned, but it didn't really seem to fit the final versions of the last couple of books...this time, it fits a lot better.) I'm hoping to have that finished by around the middle of the month, whereupon I will start revising 'Fermi's War' for a release somewhere around the 23^rd, probably. I think it'll take about a week to give it the polish it needs, but aside from my 'one a month' goal, I don't really have any plans to tie myself down to a specific date. All I have is the 'write a book, revise a book' goal for each month. Two down...a lot to go!

This one is going to be a little different, as it forms a 'trilogy' within the Battlecruiser Alamo series. I've been looking forward to writing this one for the last two weeks, largely because of the ending; a longer one of those long epic sequences that are usually a complete blast to write. I know that I've had the most fun writing the espatier scenes thus far, and in a weird way, I wasn't expecting to – now I'm at the point that an 'espatier' spin-off is definitely on the cards for sometime in the near-ish future, probably once I've finished the trilogy. No firm fixed ideas on this – at least, not any that I am at liberty to share at the moment.

Next up, is reading! Now I'm developing the habit of reading before I turn in again; I noticed a few weeks ago that I was reading a lot less than I had been, now that I no longer have a three-hour commute a day. (Yes, three hours. About the only blessing was that it wasn't very broken up so I could read.) I'm making an effort to get in at least an hour of reading each day, and using it to catch up on my research and inspiration. When I get around to doing the writer's notes for Admiralty – and I intend to do that at some point this week – I'll probably put in a little bibliography, as a lot of those books are well-worth reading.

More than that, though, I really haven't been reading my Kindle for ages. Aside from checking Admiralty's conversion before I uploaded it (and god did Alkinea make that a dream, I can recommend that for anyone using LibreOffice) I haven't actually read a book on it since March! That's going to have to change, I think, and given that I fancy honing my abilities as a book reviewer, I think I'm going to make this the Month of Kindle; every day I will try and review a self-published work on the Kindle. Focusing on SF, probably; I've got quite a backlog to work through!

Under normal circumstances, I would simply post these reviews on Amazon, but my understanding is that Amazon is a bit 'iffy' on writers reviewing the books of other people, so I'll have to content myself with posting them here instead. I'm not going to have any sort of a schedule; I'll pretty much just see what catches my eye on my list. A good reason to have a break in between writing bursts. (In an 'eight-hour' day, I usually write for three concentrated one-hour spells, doing around two thousand words at a time, with about an hour in between to ponder where to go next.)

So, that's to look forward to, and naturally I will let everyone know progress on the books, both on the scale on the left side of the blog (I generally update that at least every day, sometimes more often – and 'blue' means that the first draft is being written, 'red' that it has been finished and the beta readers are going through it, with 'green' indicating that these second draft is done and I'm in the process of converting and submitting it. Once a book is done, obviously it goes from the list.)

I suppose I'd better get back to work....