Hello everyone! I hope you're all off to a fabulous start this new year. I just wanted to update you all on my progress with Survivors of PEACE and give you an opportunity to provide input on a related project. If you're just here for that, go ahead and scroll to the bottom to find out more and share your opinion. But first, here's what I've been up to lately.
The first draft of Survivors of PEACE is well underway and is currently sitting at 65,428 words and 27 complete chapters. I have 43 chapters outlined, so based on those numbers and a general guess of where I'm at in the story, I'm probably a little past the halfway point. I don't have any concrete ideas about when it will be ready for release, but I'm just shooting for sometime in 2018. Progress is happening, even if it's not as fast as I might like. I set a goal for myself at the beginning of the month to write at least 1,000 words per day until this draft is finished, and that's been going well. It's a small enough goal that it doesn't feel overwhelming on the days I have a lot going on, and on days when I have more free time, I'm usually on a roll by the time I hit that 1,000 word mark and just want to keep going. I'm hoping to be done with the draft by mid-February, when I'll be heading to my first ever conference for speculative fiction writers, artists, and other creators.
There are a few reasons why this draft is taking so long, the primary one being that the story itself is just longer and more complex than the two previous books. I got a little carried away with all the different ideas I want to explore, so now I have this monster to wrestle with. I also didn't get much work done on the story immediately following Renegades' release because I was trying to finish Courageous Cody and get that published. And if you've been keeping up with me on social media, you may have seen some of my posts about school. I'm finishing up my practicum hours this semester so I can graduate in May, but I also just finished applying for grad school, which will start immediately after graduation (if I get in). So I've been pretty busy, but Survivors is my main priority now and I want to get it as polished as possible before May.
Survivors of PEACE will be the last book in the series and probably the last we'll see of these characters. I love them to pieces and I've enjoyed going on this journey with them, but I have so many other characters and so many other ideas begging for my attention. In light of that, I've been contemplating what I might want to do for some kind of complete collection eBook of the series. For the past year or so, I've been toying with this idea for a short story featuring Alma, one of the secondary characters in the Secrets of PEACE series. That will happen regardless of whatever else I decide to do, but I thought it might be fun to write a few short stories featuring some of the other characters to include with the complete collection. I plan to work on them in between revisions on Survivors and will probably release them early as they are completed to newsletter subscribers.
I have some vague ideas for which characters might feature in those, but I also want to hear readers' thoughts. Are there any characters from Secrets of PEACE you want to know more about? Who? If you think of anyone, please let me know by leaving a comment here or contacting me on social media. I'd love to hear from you.