I decided to do something new this year and provide an update on my writing projects at the end of the year. This has been the second full year I’ve been focusing on writing, and with a book already published, people might be interested in what’s going on. I may not have published a book, but this year has been a busy one. In addition to my writing, I started a part-time job twice to bolster my income, guested on two podcasts, helped organize two simulation and LARP events, attended a gaming retreat and ran one of my modules there, and launched a website! A lot of it may not have been writing, but it’s all helped me in some way to become a better writer. I didn’t get as far as I’d wanted in several of my projects, but I still made considerable progress.
Gemtouched Memoirs
The second book of the Gemtouched Memoirs still isn’t done, but it’s over twice as long as it was at the end of last year. As of this writing, it stands at 122,577 words and has at least 15,000, if not 25,000 more to go. For comparison, Escape from Salmira has 70,219 words. In a lot of ways, I feel like the first book is a prelude to the main story.
I finally feel like my working title is more solid— Gemtouched. I’ve had some other title ideas run through my head, and there’s still a chance it could change, but so far this is the one that makes most sense for the entirety of the book. Why? You’ll have to read it to find out.
This series will be five books long, and the more I think about book five, the more excited I get. When I started the series, I knew the first book had at least one sequel, but I didn’t know for sure how many. Due to some good writing advice I received shortly before Escape from Salmira was published, I fleshed out the rest of the series and figured out how many books there would be and roughly what would happen in each. As I’ve been writing, I keep getting more ideas for things to come up in each book. I’m so glad that though I didn’t know exactly what the rest of the series would look like when I wrote the first book, I had the foresight to plant several little things in it. They’ll be important later…
D&D Projects
For some reason I feel like I didn’t do a whole lot on the D&D front this year, but I published seven new modules and collections, which is only two less than last year. These included New Year of Darkness, Tasha’s Corkboard of Notes, The Monster of the North, Azdrulma the Dreadful, The Siege of Yewshire, The Missing Professor, and Dead Elf’s Party. Most of these were written in my efforts to write a module for every month and season, though a couple (Tasha’s and Azdrulma) were not.
I completed my winter and spring sets, and they are now available in season bundles. I have three more to write and publish to finish up summer and autumn. Once those are done, I’ll include all sixteen in a complete seasonal bundle. I also have a larger supplement I’ve slowly been working on with worldbuilding helps, optional rules, and customizations that will be a lot of fun.
It was a great year for several of my previously published products! Two magical items achieved Copper Best Seller status, while another one—and one of my modules—reached Silver! I have several more that are flirting with reaching best seller or upgrading, which is exciting to see.
Serial Novel
Tawariell’s Tale is still ongoing, though because our game group has slowed down how often we play and took a break for a few months, I’ve had to slow down how often I post a new chapter. If I’d kept at the rate of a chapter a week, I’d be out of content by now. But believe me, I’m just as anxious—probably more anxious—as you are to see how this story wraps up. I have some ideas of where it’s going to go, but because I’m not the one who knows what’s going on in the background I could be totally wrong. I have been before!
NaNoWriMo
For NaNoWriMo this year I was hoping to start on the third Gemtouched Memoirs book, but without the second one coming to a conclusion, that was next to impossible. There are too many major components I have yet to write that will immediately come into play at the beginning of book three. At one point I thought I wouldn’t do NaNoWriMo because I had no project that was ready, nothing conceptualized. Then a little over a week before November I came up with an extremely vague idea, quickly building the ghost of a story around it. I worked on the idea while simultaneously working on Dead Elf’s Party in a rush to get them both done before Halloween.
Somehow or another, I did it. While I had a simplistic outline and barely hashed-out character concepts, I started a brand new series for NaNoWriMo. While I struggled at first to get into it (in part because I had a much better idea of what needs to happen in book two, but it’s also been new sub-genres for me), I’ve really fallen in love with this story, the magic, and the characters— even the ones I’ve had to kill. It’s a war epic, I guarantee people are going to die. Sorry, not sorry. (But at the same time, I am?)
This series has a lot more intricacies that I have to get right between books, so it might be a while before the first one comes out. Because of that, I’m toying with the idea of pursuing traditional publishing for this one.
Conclusion
It’s been kind of a weird year, but a good one at the same time. I’ve created new worlds that my mind likes to live and create in. I’ve expanded my genre pool and types of characters I can write. I’m looking at what I have coming up in 2022, and I’m excited. There’s a lot of good headed this way!