Positive Feedback
Quite a few changes and updates to my active works, but I’d like to start off by thanking a couple book bloggers for their amazing reviews of Kludged Singularity. Clive at Whispering Stories and Ellie at Bookish Beyond were both gracious enough to put considerable time and effort into their reviews. I’d like to encourage everyone to check out both reviews and the sites themselves if you like discovering new books through reviews.
Clive’s review at Whispering Stories
Whispering Stories puts out reviews over a vast range of genres with amazing frequency thanks to the work of their team.
Ellie’s review at Bookish Beyond
Ellie is the sole operator of the Bookish Beyond site and is sharing her thoughts on unique books in fantasy, horror, and other darker genres.
I’m extremely grateful that they enjoyed the book and were willing to share their thoughts. Reviews are hard to come by without an established following, and many review blogs don’t accept self-published books. While the enjoyment and endorsement from family and friends is absolutely appreciated, seeing positive words from objective reviewers who do this sort of thing regularly is extremely encouraging.
Mobile Goalposts
One of the nice things about writing on my own terms is that I get to move my goals around and re-prioritize my active works at my whim. Obviously doing this too often would be an issue, but in this case I think it’s the right decision.
I have decided to pause my efforts on audiobook recording for Kludged Singularity. I’m happy with how the book turned out, and feedback has been almost entirely positive, but I don’t think it’ll make a return on my time investment at this point. That, and I need significantly more practice before I can produce a product I’m willing to put my name on from the narration side. If I didn’t have to do a German accent for a major character this would have had much quicker progress.
The sequel to Kludged Singularity has also been deprioritized, but for a different reason. The sequel has taken a backseat to the LitRPG I’m working on. I’m having too much fun with these characters in a fantasy game world, so I’m going to keep the momentum going on that. If it peters out I’ll switch gears. I had hoped to write a slightly shorter book for the LitRPG but it’s looking like it’ll only be about 25% shorter than Kludged Singularity.
It’s been a little over two months since I started outlining and re-purposing chunks I’d written for my 2018 NaNoWriMo attempt into a new LitRPG novel. In that time I’ve managed to put down just under 50k words, about halfway into the novel, and I feel like I’ve finally hit my stride with pulling things together in the story. In that time I also I built out spreadsheets and compiled enough data to ensure proper RPG-style progression, primarily for my use on the backend. Advancing characters and handling combat are much more efficient with a consistent way to verify I’m following my own rules.
The story itself has expanded from my initial idea, but in a manageable way. Originally slated for just over novella length, I realized that I would have to condense a lot of things and as a result the scenes were feeling rushed. Once I stopped trying to artificially restrict the story I was much happier with the results.
Now that the shape of the world is a bit more visible I’ll start dropping some details over time in the blog here and there. These may take the form of draft snippets or discussions on magic, combat, or other experiments that go into planning out a LitRPG.
Stay safe and be kind to one another in the meantime.
