Writing Update: May 2025

Hello everyone,

Firstly, you all need to know that I am dictating this rather than typing it because my hands are killing me right now. I was doing a little warm up practice at judo and did the finger extensions which, uh, in theory is a great exercise. Unfortunately, I spend the whole day on the computer, and I forgot why I generally try not to do too many of those exercises. For those of you who don't know what finger extensions are, just think about how you'd cast magic missiles, mostly by splitting your fingers wide open. Do that, ohh, about 50 times in a row, full extension. 

Now you know what I'm feeling.

Anyway, today I'm going to be dictating as well because I'm too tired to go and actually create the usual update with individual series information. You're just going to have to deal with the stream of thought consciousness.

The first thing I guess I have to tell you is that I have a story coming out in the Augment volume 2 shadowrun newsletter. May 15th to be exact. I'm actually really excited about this, as any of the gamers in the audience would understand. Who knows, I might start writing for licensed media.

Not really, as they don't really pay that well, and really, the only 2 IP's I have any knowledge of these days to any decent extent would be Eve Online and the World of Darkness. And I haven't played Eve in years and I already wrote the Eternal Night series to cover my vampire fanboy cravings.

OK. Publishing, the shadowrun short story. Very exciting news.

I do have a couple of other pieces of news, but they are all currently embargoed, so until I get told I can talk to you all about it, I'm just going to have to leave hints.

In the meantime, I am still working on the Thousand Li sequel. It is now at 212,000 words, and while I am at the final battle scene, or series of final battles, I keep saying that it'll be another 10 to 15 to 20,000 words and at 15 to 20,000 words written it's another 15 to 20,000 words away. At this point, I don't think it's going to be 220 thousand words or even 200k words but more likely 250k before I'm done with the first draft.

Which means that this might be a 300,000 word epic before I am done.

Aeres Academy, the first book of the Dungeon Brawler series is currently being published on the Patreon because we are intending to publish that this year. Exact date needs to be pinned down, we might bounce it by a month but we will find out. I received the copy edits back and now I need to go through the proofs. Relatively soon after that, it has to go to the narrator. Unfortunately, my brain power is currently being absorbed by the ATL sequel so, yeah.

I have finished another two of the ATL shorts, and I'm working on a third. One of those shorts has been edited, the second needs to be re-written, and the third needs to be finished. All of that has to happen within this month so that's another thing that's on the horizon.

And of this year, we've also promised that we would have a fourth Hidden Dishes book out. Since we have to pre-order up, I do have to write that, though I think it'll be done during the summer. Potentially right after I finish this never ending sequel.

As you can guess, when a book goes from 200,000 woods to probably 250 if not 300,000 words. and the Dungeon Brawler book 1 was already much longer than I expected, it throws my writing schedule all off.

I don't exactly know what's going to give, and I won't really be able to figure it out until I finished this book, but I assume, that at least one or two series might be put on temporarily hold. That's most likely going to be Climbing the Ranks, though maybe not.

What could also happen is that I slow down on releases for something like the Hidden Dishes series, and extend when some Dungeon Brawler books come out. I don't really want to do that though, but the only other option would be to make the ATL sequel series book 2 have a much longer gap, like a full year.

Either way, I've now written about 300,000 words for the year and it's only the first third. Normally, that would be just about under half of what I would write in a year, and I am feeling it. I won't say I'm close I'm burning out, but I'm hovering at the edges.

Anyway, just figured I'd keep people updated.