For being the shortest month of the year, February has had a lot going on!
I’ve picked up steam on Gemtouched Memoirs 3, which is coming along nicely. Well, my characters might not think so, but I do. Still moving slower than I’d like, and I’ve pushed out my projected completion date to the end of May, but that’s mainly because I’ve been working on a lot of other projects.
The second draft of my new series is done! That’s one less thing to be working on for a while, until my writing group gets through it, which should be at the end of April.
I went to the Life, The Universe, and Everything Symposium (commonly known as LTUE), which was a lot of fun for me. I learned a lot, met some awesome people, and will definitely be applying to be a panelist next year. You know you’re a writer when some of the favorite panels you attended were on comma usage, utilities and infrastructure, and black markets.
I also went filking for the first time, folk singing of sci-fi and fantasy fans, which was a blast, and I look forward to doing it more in the future. I’ll be bashing the balrog for a while, won’t ever set the cat on fire, will continue to beg a stick to become a fire, and will break free with the wicked girls saving themselves.
And finally, but perhaps most exciting, typesetting for the hardcover of Escape from Salmira is almost done! I should be finishing that up today, then it’s just adjusting the cover before ordering the proof! Once I receive that, I’ll see if any other adjustments need to be made, but expect to see the hardcover available next month!
I had intended to post this last week, but between a website outage and a crippling headache, that didn’t happen. I plan on posting updates more often throughout the year, monthly at the very least.
The fourth draft of Gemtouched is done and out to gamma readers! That happened at the beginning of the month, which was great because I’d been trying so hard to get it done by the new year. I was only a few days shy of my goal. From what I gather in the realm of publishing, that’s pretty good!
Book three of The Gemtouched Memoirs is coming along slowly, but still making progress. I need to pick up the pace to reach my goal of 175k words by the end of April, which I anticipate is what I’ll need to finish the book. The pace I have to keep in order to do that isn’t too crazy—just over half of NaNoWriMo words per day—but with other projects in motion, I need to make sure I’m not ignoring it either.
Speaking of other projects, the new series I’m working on is getting sent to my writing group chapter by chapter, and they’ve been enjoying it! It’s an ambitious project (my group hasn’t grasped how ambitious yet), and it’s still going to need some heavy revisions to give it the quality it deserves, but I’m happy with how it’s going. That’s currently my main focus, getting the second draft (light revisions) done ASAP so it’s just ready to send to my writing group and I can focus on Gemtouched Memoirs 3 until I get feedback from Gemtouched again and need to work on those revisions.
I’ve got some D&D ideas brewing around, but I haven’t really touched them in a while. However, yesterday I got another pretty solid idea. I’ll probably putter around with it when I need a break from other projects.
However, in the D&D realm I have another Copper Bestseller! Tasha’s Corkboard of Notes reached Copper status in January, which made me very excited! It’s one of my favorite projects, in large part because it’s so different from anything else I’ve done. I just reread it and was laughing out loud at several things that I’d forgotten I’d come up with. Who expects to find a note from an orc?
I’ll be interested to see what the next month brings. It tends to be my best month for D&D stuff (go figure, the shortest month of the year), and I’m hoping that The Heart Thief will hit Electrum Bestseller with Valentine’s Day, which I wrote it for. I’ll also be attending Life, the Universe, and Everything (LTUE) in Provo for the first time (at least as a professional, I think I attended a single panel when I was 12).
Huh, this ended up being longer than I anticipated. My goal is to update more often so that they don’t have to be this long each time. Keep a lookout for them!
This year has been very different for my writing. A good different, though it also means that some projects didn’t get as much attention as usual. I started working a full-time job again this summer, which has slowed things down, but I’m definitely still keeping things moving, just at a slightly slower pace.
One major thing that has happened this year is I’ve (finally) joined a writing group! It has been a lot of fun, and their feedback has been priceless. I had been nervous about having people see such early drafts of my work, but it has been well worth it, and now I look forward to hearing them talk about it, and occasionally rip a chapter to shreds. It means my books are going to be that much better. It’s also been fantastic to be able to analyze the works of other authors and help them to improve their stories.
I also attended Brandon Sanderson’s lecture class at the beginning of the year, which has made an impact on my writing, but not as big of one as I thought it would. That has actually given me a lot more confidence in my work and skills. A lot of what he covered I either already knew, or seemed common sense to me as a writer. I still learned things (and continue to learn from other avenues, there’s always room for improvement), but the biggest takeaway I had was that I already know what I’m doing.
You may also have seen a bit more from me on social media this year, although, not on this blog, unfortunately. One of my resolutions this year is to post here more frequently. Besides my Facebook page, I now have a TikTok and Instagram, @ladyrebeccaelf on both platforms. It’s been a fun way to share insights and funny things about my writing!
Gemtouched Memoirs
It’s been a big year for this series! Nothing new has been published yet, but not only did I finish the first draft of the second book, which will be titled Gemtouched, but I’m also almost done with the fourth draft! I’ll be sending that to gamma readers next week, then once I get their feedback, I’ll complete the final two drafts! One draft to make any changes needed from reader feedback, and a polishing draft, making sure things sound pretty and there aren’t any typos (a feat, as the book is right around 185,000 words). Then the finishing processes to publication! This book has been so much fun to write and get reactions about. Escape from Salmira was only scratching the surface.
Besides having book two close to publication, my NaNoWriMo project this year was book three! It’s coming along nicely, and I’m glad that I started it before book two is published, as it helped me refine some points that change the perspective of some people that will show in Gemtouched. It didn’t cause any major changes, just some minor ones that will make things feel more whole. I’m really excited about how it’s turning out, and I haven’t even touched some things I’m most looking forward to.
D&D Projects
These have taken the back burner this year, and maybe even been put in the fridge. I only published one module, which did finish another seasonal bundle, but I still have three more to write to finish off the year. Four, if you count the bonus module I decided I’m going to write for the full-year bundle. I’ve got a larger supplement in the works to help DMs with their worldbuilding, but it still has some work to do. I’m hoping that once I have some editing drafts done on my novels that I’ll be able to get back to these, I do miss them.
Serial Novel
This project is at a standstill, but it’s not my fault. Our D&D group has been having a lot of scheduling conflicts this year and I quickly caught up in the story to where I felt comfortable publishing (there’s a chance memories will be tampered with, and that hasn’t come to a resolution yet). The story is still ongoing, but at an ooze’s pace. It might still be a while before I can publish more chapters, but then I’ll have several to publish.
War Epic Trilogy
I’m very much waffling on what to title both the series and the novel, so I’m just going to refer to this project by its genre. This was my NaNoWriMo project last year, and I finished the first draft in September. It’s currently going through my writing group, and I plan on writing the second book this year.
Unlike Gemtouched Memoirs, the first book of the series won’t stand well on its own. The story wraps up, all except for the thread that continues into book two, which promises more is coming. This is a bit of a risky move on my part, but the only way this series will work unless I were to write it all as one novel, which I don’t think will work as well. The book ends a little too cleanly to continue on in the same volume. Because of all this, I won’t be submitting to agents until at least the second book is done, so this series is still probably several years out before publication.
Conclusion
I’ve grown a lot as a writer this year, and I’m comfortable with the direction I’m heading. I’ve taken on a heavier workload this year than I have before, and great things have come about because of it. My characters still surprise me at times, which earns them painful character arcs, and I’m still having fun playing with my magic systems and interacting with my worlds. This is why I love writing, I get to make new people, places, and things to play with! (Nouns, I create nouns?) Here’s to more adventures in 2023!
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!
I was excited to see that over the weekend, my latest module, Azdrulma the Dreadful, was the fourth hottest seller in the level 17+ adventures category on DM’s Guild!
While it only stayed there for a day or two, you can still get it here!
Welcome to my brand-new website! It’s so nice to have all of my writing creations all in one place in an organized fashion. I’ll be posting updates here on project progress, thoughts from my writing, and whenever something new is published. Take a look around, stay awhile, and let me know what you love most!