It’s a new year! Here are my writing plans for the next few months.
My first and highest priority is finishing my new book. For those who don’t know, this is the first volume in a new urban fantasy series that I’m hoping to be working on for most of this decade. The first draft is currently up to 80,000 words, which includes a fair bit of edits and rewrites. I’d been hoping to have the book finished by the end of December – unfortunately the rewrites took longer than I’d hoped, so the new deadline I’ve set myself is the end of January, and I’m going to push myself to try to make this one (I really want this book completed so that I can get the publication train rolling). The good news is that I’m pretty pleased with the book and the setting, so I think there’s a good chance that you guys will like it too!
Once that’s done I’m planning on writing a second Alex Verus short story/novella. This one is going to be set after Risen, as a sort of minor epilogue to the series, and will focus on one particular character who had some larger-than-usual question marks hanging over them at the end of the book. I’ll probably do the bulk of this in February, and I’ll publish it online shortly afterward, in a similar way to what I did with Favours.
On the website front, the next two posts will be a couple of Ask Lunas – I’ve got a backlog of questions which I’d like to clear out. I’m still planning on running the Ask Luna column for a while long, but I’m intending to gradually taper it off over the course of this year. Now that the main series is finished, the series timeline isn’t progressing in parallel with the real-world timeline any more.
Somewhere along the line I also need to do the Author Commentary for Risen. This’ll probably take a while, firstly because it’s going to be a long one, and secondly because I’m still getting some interesting feedback on Risen from the reviews I’m reading. Some of them make me realise things about the book that I hadn’t previously thought about.
And finally, I need to catch up on my email. Thanks to everyone who’s written in following the publication of Risen and the end of the series, both in email and in comment form. Most of the emails have consisted of fans saying very nice things about me, Risen, and the Alex Verus series in general, so thank you all for the praise! I’ll try to reply to them all properly when I get a moment, but I wanted you to know that I really appreciate the messages. I’m glad so many of you have enjoyed the series so much!