Development Diary #19: The Light at the End of the Tunnel
When we started this year, you probably didn’t think we’d end up where we are right now. 2020 has been a serious ride, and it looks like that ride isn’t even halfway over. On one hand, I can’t believe it’s almost July. On the other, I can’t believe it’s this year hasn’t completed.
While 2019 was a big sign demanding that I wait my turn, 2020 has been a mix of victories and trials.
So far this year, I’ve produced 3 audiobooks and worked on two different revision projects for my small press. In a lot of respects, this year has been the first time I’ve seen a true light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to actually releasing new stories. Covid-19 slowed me down a touch because I had to homeschool my son, but I still pushed forward.
But then tragedy hit.
My mother passed on May 1st. The whole thing was a surprise. There was no warning. It was something that just happened. And since I’m an only child, the responsibility of dealing with her estate fell to me.
On May 15th, my car caught fire… which then caught the house/business that I run on fire as well. I’ve been spending the last month and a half trying to hold together this ship of fractured glass, trying to keep it floating just long enough for things to return to some sense of normalcy.
Unfortunately, my laptop was in my car when it caught fire, so I was out of a computer to do much of my work for a couple of weeks. Most of my files were backed up, however. I learned that lesson when I lost my last laptop to an unfortunate spill a few years back.
But this isn’t meant to be a pity party. Despite all of that adversity, we’ve had some fantastic advances forward.
First, my partner at Emergent Realms is having a baby in October. She and her husband couldn’t be happier, and I’m excited for them!
When we received the dev edits for her project, we decided to shoot for October (just before the baby comes) for its release. We don’t have a hard release date yet, but revisions are almost complete and we’ll be sending the manuscript to the copy editor soon. Once we get the copy edit back, we’ll be setting a firm release date. So look forward to that very soon.
We’ve also commissioned the artwork for the cover and man… It looks SO COOL. AHS is VERY picky about her artwork, and this one cover is really checking the boxes.
This is finally happening, guys. Emergent Realms is finally coming together. And we couldn’t be happier that we did it on OUR terms instead of rushing something to market just to kickstart things.
I received the dev edits for my novel at the end of April, right before everything exploded in my face. But once I got my new laptop, I attacked the revisions with a vengeance. I don’t want to release my novel in the same window as my partner’s because we don’t have the marketing bandwidth to handle that. So mine will likely come next spring. I’ve gotten through roughly 50k words of the manuscript so far, so that puts me at about the 25% mark for completing revisions. I hoping to wrap that by the end of July and send it in for copy edits in August.
Did I mention we also built languages from scratch for our worlds?
Yeah. We went that deep.
But more on that later.
