It's been a busy week since Thanksgiving, what with planning for Christmas, regular work, and starting to plan my next novel. Sorry for the irregular updates, we'll see if I can start to post a bit more often now that I am starting to work on another story.
I've actually had a few "revelations" of a sort, while driving in to work, regarding Balfrith's stories. I had always planned to write several novels about his adventures, but in my mind they were standalone stories, with a possible "epic" level multi-volume story to cap it all off. They stories would have spanned a couple of decades, so by the end of them, Balfrith would have been near to my own age.
But what has started to reveal itself to me during my drives, was a way to link the stories into a larger story or character arc with a unifying theme. I don't want to say too much about it, since that would give away some spoilers before they have even been written. And of course things may yet change between now and the actual writing, or revising, of the stories. But in general, I think the ideas will stand the test of time and Balfrith's adventure stories will be much more closely linked together than what I had originally conceived.
Currently my writing consists of brainstorming the next standalone novel, and in light of the above, how to link it to Balfrith's first adventure as well as lay the seeds for the one(s) to come after.
I'm nowhere near to posting any samples yet, and I don't want to post anything like a rough story outline since that would be a major spoiler. So for now anyway, y'all will just have to wait for me to lay the foundation for the next story, and then I'll probably start to put samples up on the blog once again.
Back to the first Balfrith story for a moment... I am still going back and forth between wanting to self-publish, which is a lot of work but could be personally rewarding, and trying to get published through a "traditional" publisher, which takes much of the burden off my shoulders but is also glacially slow and also requires work on my part in the submission process as well as everything that follows if I do get accepted by someone.
I have had a few people read the story and tell me they really liked it, which is encouraging. What I haven't yet done is worked with any true "beta readers". That should probably be my next logical step, but things have been busy enough that I simply haven't gotten around to working through the details of that yet.
More to come later.
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