Thanks to everyone’s support in sharing it and the great LitRPG communities out there, Forge of Eternity: Alpha Testing is doing well in the wild. Now that it’s released and I’ve taken care of the first stage of marketing, I can talk about what’s next in the series. Next on deck is book two in the main series, and a serialized project in the same world that I’m going to have some fun with.
Book two, Beta Testing, is fully outlined and picks up shortly after Alpha Testing with the same characters. Without spoiling the first book, I can say that the world gets a little bigger for everyone. Alpha Testing focused on a small region of the much wider game world, Beta Testing will dig more into the lore of the world and allow for a bit more travel. There’s not much I can share if I’m going to keep from ruining things, but I think this book might a little shorter than the first if I can stick to my planning.
Since books take some time to write, revise, edit, beta read, proofread, revise, edit, and publish, I was looking for smaller chunks of story in the world I could release more frequently. Originally I had an idea for a series of short stories involving a “Disillusionist” character, an illusionist of questionable ethics and unfortunate circumstances. Disillusionist: Deceived sets the stage and acts as an origin story, from which I could branch out into any number of scenarios. I had a few short stories outlined, set aside as fun projects to take a break from the main series books and give a higher frequency of produced material.
Amazon decided to beta launch a new product to US authors that made me revise these plans. Amazon Vella is a serialized storytelling platform, allowing for stories to be posted episodically. Looking over my short stories revealed that there was a logical progression to them that could be explored with a little bit of tweaking. I recently chewed through the first three audiobooks in the John Carter of Mars series, and I could feel the serialized nature in the writing as a sort pleasant ebb and flow of question and resolutoin. With a first person, single POV focus, The Disillusionist is perfect character for this type of storytelling and I think people will enjoy it more as a single coherent story instead of occasional interludes.
Vella doesn’t launch for a few months, and I should have a decent backlog episodes when it does without impacting the main series book’s production schedule. You can find the status of my current in progress works at the page of the same name on the menu bar.
You must log in to post a comment.