I’ve been busy since the last update, so I thought I’d give an update on what’s going on.
Before we get into it, however: Happy Gregorian and Chinese New Year!
As I’ve said, I’ve been quite busy working to get the first book of Zephora Crisis out of the way and into the public. That’s all I’ve been working on since the last news update, which was the release of The Severis Tales 6. I had planned some blog post topics, but I found them rather unsatisfying as concepts for discussion. I’ve been silent since, posting and replying to others on my Twitter account.
I set a plan to have the first book of Zephora Crisis out by the end of the first quarter of 2020. That’s April 1. Now, I set the deadline myself, but I did not set a hard date. I haven’t announced it to the world, only the background stuff. Thank god I didn’t, because I had a lot of issues after.
I did re-activate the Elineer section of the website with a placeholder book cover with a book name and estimated release date. Overall it’s fine, but the finer details I thought need to be tweaked again.
What happened was I took a hard look at the outline and manuscript to verify that everything was intact; and within the first two chapters I knew I had a problem. None of the timelines worked. Everything was askew. Also, when I wrote it, my writing style was, to put it bluntly, shit. Since then, I’ve done the entries for the CBC Short Story Contest and I’ve done multiple episodes of The Severis Tales, and my writing has vastly improved. I’ve since redone the outline and the calendar for the book’s timeline. Because I am intending to self-publish through Amazon KDP, in paper and electronic formats, I feel I can stretch Revision 5 out more. I also felt very disappointed that I cut a lot of my original work out to fit it within an ~80,000 word limit. I’ve decided to retool some of my plot and implement the original ending to the book.
Then, one day, while coming home from work on the bus, I thought about the names of the books I had planned and compared them with some of the new plot lines. I do think the name needs to change, so I went away and had a little think about it, and I think I have a more appropriate title than just “Journey.” Even the overall arc title “Zephora Crisis” may change, as I’m not entirely comfortable with that one, either. I will be providing an update to what the first book will be called, but I’m sure I won’t be sticking simply with “Journey.”
So far, I’ve rewritten, self-proofed and self-edited the prologue and chapters one to six. I thought that with the turnaround time I specified, editing and getting all the stuff I wanted done may be too much for me to handle; however, things are going well so far, and I may be able to publish the book during that deadline. There are still things needed to be done: proper grammar editing and proofing (which, with $0 to be able to invest to get someone to read my material, is going to be stupidly difficult), a proper book cover design (which I am setting roughly $500 aside for), and other things, like maps and some drawings, which I would like to include in the final publication. That’s a lot of work for a few months time.
Then, after that, there’s marketing and promotion, the publication of the book, then announcing it to everyone around. That’s also a lot of work, but I think I can manage it with my frequent schedule-varying job.
Regardless, I’d like to thank those who supported me and gave me confidence to pursue this book. Hopefully all this work i have put into making everything Patrick Rivers will not go to waste and be a failure.
To summarize: Elineer is a few steps closer to reality, I’m changing things, and I’m still alive. Stay tuned for more updates. For those who signed up to the mailing list, I will be giving out a newsletter update soon. I meant to do it before Christmas, but that never happened, unfortunately.