Over the last few weeks, I have been working on three main writing projects. The Second Sight and Earth bound revisions, as well as a new short story called Ghosted for another anthology I am submitting too.
Second Sight is getting close to its re-release. It’s with the (hopefully) final beta readers/bug hunters now. Once I have that feedback, I will be able to do its final revision. I am hoping, all going well, that this should be re-released in June, and I will be revealing the fantastic new cover for this shortly before its due. Its been a long revision, but I feel it’s now the story I had always wanted it to be. So, watch this space for more details on dates and cover soon.
Earth Bound doubled in length during its revision, moving it from a good-sized short story into a novella. It’s taking a bit longer to revise due to size, so it’s not gone through Beta readers yet. I am working on that this month, plus the outlines for the rest of the novellas in the series. I am planning for four novellas initially (including Earth Bound) with potentially more to follow after that.
Both of these projects have been almost a complete re-write of the original story. This has been both exciting and heartbreaking at times. Some parts of the story that I loved had to be cut because they no longer belonged in that story, and others have been replaced with something that is even more exciting.
The stories are better for it, tighter, sharper, and it was definitely worth it. It really reinforces the idea that this should be its one and only revision. If I’d had a better grasp of revision when I had published them, I would not have been revising them at all now (except for technical mistakes of course).
The last project, Ghosted, is a short story for a new Anthology. It has let me revisit characters I have used before in two other submissions (still waiting on a response). It was a blast to work on. I’d initially written a very rough draft, and I’d been unhappy with it, so being able to turn it around like that has felt amazing.
There have been a few other things I have been working on around these, cover design for Earth Bound series, and some updates to the web site. I’ll be talking about Covers later when I am finally ready to show Earth bounds cover that I am designing myself.
Altogether, I feel pretty good about the progress I’ve made over the last few weeks. Once those projects are completed, I will be getting back to my novel revision and revising the last self-published short story Wishing for Truths.
I was also included in a free anthology which was pretty amazing. Look for my previous blog about this if you want to buy a copy, its free and has over a dozen funny stories about COIVD-19.