Can you believe it? It’s just a little more than a month until the year 2022! Despite COVID-19 and everything else going on in the world, the year just went by so fast. With regards to the writing, editing The Severis Tales as a book and concept took a lot more time than I thought.
I thought that the big fantasy project that I intend to revisit soon, Elineer, took a long time to get to the near-publishing stage before I realized it fell apart. It certainly took a few years. With The Severis Tales, the book has given me a more rudimentary understanding of planning and timelines and how long it can take to check off each goal before you get to a finished product.
So, in this post, I thought I would share an update on its progress.
As of November 21, 2022, I entered the project into the Draft 3 phase, which hopefully will be the last draft before I produce a polished manuscript fit for publishing. At just under 77,800 words, Draft 2 was an enormous push forward. Today, I’ve edited one story for grammar and spelling, and the word count inflated from rough 3,696 words to another rough 4,104 words (I am currently writing in Markdown; comment blocks will affect the word count). My target is to flesh out the stories to bring them up to a decent standard.
Is It Still Called Random Jobs?
No.
Like many of these projects, they go through phases and ultimately can change direction. When I realized that the subject of “random jobs” was not entirely workable without more research and plots, I instead made the title of what The Severis Tales represents: fantasy for the everyday reader.
So, with an assortment of stories, I present the final and I think official title for the first TST book:
The Severis Tales: Semi-Fantasy Stories for the Everyday Layperson
Catchy title, yes?
I’ve kept the retro-style book cover, deciding it was a bit of a jaunt to have weird or artsy covers. I am applying the finishing touches, at which point I will attempt to share the cover.
More About the Book
The Severis Tales is what I consider semi-contemporary fantasy—that is, it celebrates the lives and history of the ordinary with a basic fantasy theme as an overlay. I decided on this because of having the “what-if” scenario play in my head, and it serves as a possibility of such a world playing out somewhere far from our own. A little of imagination on top of what essentially are stories that have a feeling of distance yet of familiarity, as if told here, on Earth.
I started the series on the website as a set of free stories (and will continue to do so) as therapy to help me overcome shyness and extreme social anxiety in sharing any work or thought for fear of judgement. After all, I’m new and I have my imagination to share. As I continued the series and as the writing got better, I decided it was worth a try to make a book out of it with brand fresh stories to progress the lives of the Severises, their surrounding community, and of Algenon.
For those uninterested in reading the stories on the website and wish to understand some of the basic terminology and the mechanics used by the world of Algenon, I included handy reference with an introduction to the calendar system and holidays and pronouncing some names, like Xiveer.
Algenon and its people age in real time; time is roughly constant in flow with real time on Earth. As the years roll by on Earth, so do the years on Algenon.
It sounds silly, but although they are elves and dragons and half-dragons, but the characters in these stories start to feel like real people. The more I write about them, the more I feel connected to them. I suppose if you write about someone long enough, you’d feel closer to them as well.
Is There a Release Date?
Not yet.
I have yet to complete the draft, make sure the reference material is correct, and then get the format right for KDP publishing. There may not be a release date until Q1 or Q2 of 2022, about four or five months away. Please stay tuned.
Is There Anything Else Coming for TST, Mr. Rivers?
As I state, I plan to clean up and edit the previous instalments of The Severis Tales and get them to a better standard of writing and readability.
I had other ideas about what to do next. Perhaps stories unique in that are meant for radio (a podcast or such) with other things in the mix. Radio is an interesting but fantastic platform for telling stories. All you need to do is listen, and let your imagination fill in the details.
The other and most likely option is to keep on writing the series and compile another book of tales from the world of Algenon. I came up with other book title ideas with a possible common theme among them. Who knows? We will just have to see.