THIS IS TAKING LONGER THAN I INTENDED.

Story of my life.  Before I get into details, here’s the stats for this month:

Current Chapter: 10 (Status and Poison)

Pages: 143

Word Count: 65,015

Before you ask, yes, these are the numbers with the ToC and title page taken out.  About a 2000-word difference from the last post; not great, not terrible.  Could be better, but most of the work done this month was corrections and clarifications, so I think it evens out.

So, as I said, the release is taking longer than I intended – my original goal was to be done with Chapter 10 by now, and have the Prelude and Chapter 1 released for you to read.

To my misfortune, life was extremely busy this past month, and I lost some motivation in the past three weeks.  I was running overtime like crazy, alone for the longest amount of time I’ve been in a while, and just generally bogged down and exhausted.

I did, however, keep listening to the story over and over again to catch mistakes and inconsistencies, and to make sure where the next chapter was headed was where I wanted it to be.  Chapter 10 is going slow, but it is about halfway done, so with any luck, I’ll have the first chapters out by the end of the month (though to be honest, it’s looking more like mid-next-month now…)

I’m doing a few more once-overs when I can only listen, and I’m trying to write after work or on my days off.  Here’s hoping that the schedule sticks!

As a final note, I wanted to share something relatively special upon release.  I’m going to be sharing maps and designs as the chapters come out – maybe one every three releases.  If I’m able to, I would love to release one alongside every chapter, but to do that I would need better skill with the tablet I’m using, or (something I’d love to do) hire an artist for scenes and profiles.  Right now, I’m looking at just releasing the world map of Kiria with the Prelude, but please tell me if you’d be interested in this sort of thing.

For now, back to writing.

-Marcosias Isif