Wow does time ever fly! My last update was on the 12^th of February, and I don’t honestly remember what I was doing between then and the start of March, but I expect there was a lot of print proofing, marketing and administrative stuff that must have taken place.

Fortunately, I was able to start writing on the first of March. I picked up the 5^th Broken World book managed to finish it off by the end of the day on the 22^nd, writing just over 95k words to bring the book up to a total of more than 138k words—the largest I had ever written.  In comparison, Broken was 127k words and Left was 125k words, but the real surprise was that along the way I figured that my 5-book series (originally intended to be 4 books) was actually going to have to be a 6-book series.

That was a little bit of a disappointment to me because it meant that my carefully planned schedule was going to have to change, but the story that I still need to tell after finishing the 4th book was just too large to fit into one book, so that was just what needed to happen.

On the plus side, I managed to maintain a production rate of just over 5k words per working day from the 1^st to the 22^nd, so I was feeling pretty good about that, and as I got to the end of book 5 I started playing with a crazy idea… What if I were to push really hard for the last week of March and the first week of April? 5k words per day works out to 30k across 6 working days per week, so if I really buckled down I just might be able to write all 80k words I figured it would take to close out the series in just 2 weeks.

Katie was a little doubtful, but if I could pull it off, it would mean that I would start my editing round only 1 week late, and there was a chance that I could then push hard enough to get all of the editing done in April and start the next Compelled Chronicles book in May just as I’d told all of you I was planning on doing.

Unfortunately, things didn’t go according to plan. It wasn’t that I didn’t put in the effort—in fact, I managed to average more than 6,800 words per day (possible the highest long-term average I’ve ever achieved), and along the way I had one day in excess of 12,583 words (beating my previous personal record of 12,321), a day of 14,106, and what is my current personal best of 18,400 words in one day.

Given all of that, I really should have managed to do exactly what I set out to do and finished A Broken World #6 in just two weeks, but it turns out that the story I had left was a bit longer than I’d been expecting it to be—more than 211k words to be precise.

For the last couple decades or so traditional publishing has considered 80k+ to be novel length, but recently without the push to ‘pad’ a story so that publishers could charge more for it, a lot of indie authors have found that their stories end up in the 60k-70k range. By that metric, I wrote three books in April, and I’m going to be taking a hard look to see if there’s any way to split this manuscript up into two or three books rather than one giant novel. We’ll just have to see what happens there.

If you haven’t started The Society I really hope that you’ll give it a look—I’m really thrilled with how the series turned out, and the next four (more if I can find a good place to break the 6^th book) releases are all going to be in the Broken World series.

Beyond that, we had the normal trips to the doctor to get little fingers x-rayed (it ended up not being broken, thank goodness), crashed computers (I ended up losing files—including my dragon naturally speaking profile, which slowed things down as a result even once I got my desktop up and running again, but I didn’t lose any writing), and the wonderful trip for one day to the Salt Lake Comic Con/FanX that I emailed you all about before we left (which is where these pictures are all from).

Where does that leave us in the Murray household? Well, as much as I want to just jump into the next book on May first (I’m writing this on April 30^th), I have a whole host of things that I really ought to do—things like this status update, a survey, print books, just to name a few.

Given that, and the fact that Baby #3 is due to make an appearance in June, I think I’m probably realistically going to not have much chance of getting any significant writing done until July, which isn’t ideal, but if I can keep up my newfound productivity, there’s a chance that I can make up an extra book’s worth of writing across July and September, which would put me back on track.

With regards to our print layout efforts, it’s easiest now to name the books that haven’t been laid out yet rather than listing off the ones that we’ve gotten squared away. Currently we still need to get all three of the books in The Awakening series done, along with The Society, The Destroyer, Stone Heart and Left. We also need to get the 4 books in the Guadel Chronicles series redone so that the price is updated and the cover is snazzier.

Out of that list, Katie has covers done for everything but Left (I haven’t laid it out yet so she doesn’t have the dimensions available to her), which means it’s just a matter of getting the scene break graphics right (we’ve been struggling there with these most recent books) and then me getting proofs ordered and checked. That’s definitely a big part of where I’ll be spending my time during the next two months.

Our hope is still to get some business with libraries and indie bookstores, but Katie and I have decided to go ahead and try to book a table at the Salt Lake Comic Con in September this year. That’s going to involve a significant amount of work, but we are hoping that it will pay off with a chance to interact with a ton of readers and a bunch of books sold.

Beyond that, the plan is to resume writing in July and then write at least one new book every other month, although I’ll still be doing what I can to try and fit an extra book or two into that schedule if I can. I’m still going to work on finishing up the Compelled Chronicles, at which point I’ll be able to give the Reflections and Dark Reflections books the focus they deserve.

I don’t have any official release dates for anything yet, but hopefully during the next two months as I get through some of the editing passes that are starting to pile up I’ll have a better idea—either way, once I get the production pipeline filled up, you should be able to see a steady stream of releases every month. 🙂

As always, thank you for all that you do—I’m excited to see how the rest of 2016 goes!

Dean

I’m trying to do a status update with every book launch (so that I can link to it in the release email rather than putting a bunch of extra information in the body of the email), and it’s almost time for Left to go live, which means that I need to get another update written and posted.

This time I want to include a 2015 in review aspect to the post.  2015 was a critical year in that in spite of Katie’s apparent willingness to continue to let things slowly build, I felt like she’d had to put off too many dreams for too long. I decided in 2015 that the book income needed to cover our living expenses or I would need to go back to a day job in order to make sure that we could provide for baby #3 whenever it arrived.

The numbers are in, and in addition to writing more than 495k new words, we spent more than 4 times as much on advertising as compared to the year before, which drove a 60% increase in book sales. That’s not quite as good as it sounds given that we still had to pay for the aforementioned advertising, editing, and all of the other normal business stuff like web hosting, but it meant that we managed to end the year having put money into savings for the first time since we quit to write full-time more than 3 years ago.

We hit my personal threshold for being able to continue writing full-time, and Katie seems happy with the results, which means that I get to keep telling all of the stories that seem to be piling up inside my head much more quickly than I can get them out. The trick now is just making sure that we can do that well for 2016—something that has me more than a little nervous given just how hard I worked last year and how little writing I actually got done, but that’s a feeling that I’m sure most of you can relate to in some form or fashion. Life is full of uncertainties and all we can do is work hard, be smart about where we’re spending our time, and try to leave enough wiggle room in our plans to cope with the curve balls that inevitably get sent our way.

2016 so far hasn’t looked very much like I thought it would. I set a new-year’s resolution of writing a million words in 2016 because I figured that was the best way to make sure that my readers got the books they’ve been waiting for, and then promptly got sucked into what has felt like an endless round of print proofing.

One of our big goals for 2015 was to get all of my books out in print so that we could more actively pursue relationships with independent bookstores. I ended up focusing on other projects for most of 2015, but with everything that Katie was getting done in the last half of January, it was looking like we just might manage to get caught up with getting print editions out for the first time ever—but only if I got busy laying out and proofing so that Katie could stay busy with the covers.

Just as it looked like we were getting to where we could see the end of the tunnel with regards to the print versions of the Reflections books, my desktop computer went kaput and I came down with the cold that Daughter #1 brought home from kindergarten. It was a disappointing week or so which has meant that I didn’t get anywhere nearly as much writing done so far this year as I planned on.

In some ways being sick for the better part of a week might have been a good thing though, because it forced me to slow down and think about the bigger picture again (something that I often don’t do enough of). Recently I’ve been trying to do a little writing 6 days a week month in and month out, but that’s not how I used to work. Before this most recent change to my writing process, I went for more than two years alternating writing one month and doing editing, marketing and admin the next month. It was a pretty good system that resulted in me writing 6 books a year, but even more than that, it let me focus on writing to the exclusion of almost everything else, and it let me feel okay about getting to some of the necessary but less fun aspects of business that have been falling by the wayside lately.

As a result of all of that, I’ve decided to go back to my old schedule in the hopes that it will keep me fresher and working more efficiently. It’s too soon to say for sure what that will do to my overall writing productivity. I have more recurring administrative stuff now than I used to deal with (emails, marketing, just staying on top of so many books), and the increase in sales in 2015 still wasn’t enough to let me hire a part-time administrative assistant to get to all of the stuff that seems to get in the way of actually sitting down and writing.

On the plus side, I’ve started dictating all of my stuff since the last time I was working my alternating monthly workflow, and I can dictate much more quickly than I can type. I seem to end up spending some extra time on the editing side of things, but that may be enough to offset some of the extra administrative overhead I’m dealing with.

It’s possible that I’ll end up getting a little bit less written in 2016, than I did in 2014, but if I can hit 600k words this year rather than the 495k I did in 2015, that will still be a massive improvement.

Now that I’ve buried the lead, I’m happy to announce that Left will go live on the 12^th of this month, and that the following books all have print versions live with the new branding:

Broken, Torn, Trapped, Forsaken, Riven, Driven, Lost, Marked, Bound, Hunted, Ambushed & Shattered.

The four Guadel Chronicles books need reworked (I did the back covers instead of having Katie do them, so they aren’t as pretty), but the old versions are still available in the normal places.

Burned, Splintered, The Greater Darkness, and A Darkness Mirrored all have print proofs winging their way to Utah, and hopefully I’ve got them all right this time so that I can approve them with the printer and have them show up at the various retailers rather than having to upload a new version and order another round of proofs.

Reborn, Immortal, Endless, Stone Heart, The Society & The Destroyer are all finally laid out and ready to go on my end, which means that as soon as Katie gets the wraparound covers squared away I can load them up and order proofs.

Doing the wraparound cover for a new series is always a little challenging because there are a few dozen tiny decisions that have to be made with regards to everything from the typography on the spine to the background image on the back cover, but once we get all of that figured out, it seems like Katie can polish off a new print cover every day or two. Hopefully that means that we’ll be able to at least get the proofs ordered and headed our way by the end of the month, so that I can put the two or so hours per book required into checking the physical proofs.

Hopefully the print books ultimately help contribute enough extra sales that we’ll be able to justify bringing an assistant onboard sometime this year so that I can spend more time in 2017 writing. I seem to be a year behind on the print and completed series goals we set in 2015, so maybe 2017 will be the year I finally hit a million new words written in just 12 months.

I’ve got a bunch of other things that I should be doing right now, but I decided that it was time to get my status update for Feb written now, or I’m not going to get it done before I need to start writing my next book.

January was a tough month. I decided that I needed to write Isaac’s post Riven story (so a Reflections book). Some of my recent books have almost written themselves, but this one wasn’t like that. Partly that was because I needed to define a bunch more of the back story that up until now had either been very nebulous, or completely blank.

An awful lot of the backstory has just gradually come to me over the years, which is the way that I prefer the work. When it all happens organically it feels like there is less risk that I’m going to get something wrong, which is especially important when you start talking about the really big-picture stuff that tends to shape the major plot threads either directly or indirectly.

I don’t really believe in writer’s block, so that meant that I couldn’t just sit around and wait for the stuff I needed to come to me. I had to go out and actively start filling in the pieces I needed, and it was a stressful kind of activity to be doing on a deadline. I got a late start in January (I can’t really remember why now, but I think it might have been because of some editing I was doing), so there was quite a bit of pressure, but I managed to put another big swath of history in place and overall I think it will serve both series really well.

The other reason that I struggled was because I didn’t have much in the way of plot going into Isaac’s book. When you have a plot, then the history and world building tend to take care of themselves. When you have the history and the world building set out, then the plot takes care of itself. When you start without the need bits of either, then life gets tough.

The fact that I had to fit Isaac’s book into the framework of what had come before his book (including a conversation with Jasmin in Driven) added another level of difficulty, and there were some tricky parts when it came to what was going to happen with some supporting characters, but over the course of a couple days things slowly came together on my outline, and I was able to really get started on the rough draft on the 7^th. I typed the last word 22 working days (25 calendar days) later, and the manuscript ended up being 119,762 words long.

I need to go back through it in April, I suspect that I’m going to find that it’s a little rough in spots, but I think I’m also going to find that it is some of my most solid writing yet. I’m thrilled to have gotten Isaac to where he is by the end of the book, and I wish that there was a way to get it out to all of you tomorrow rather than 6 or 7 months from now.

February was difficult for other reasons, mostly just the normal kind of life events that you deal with regardless of what you do for employment, but I did end up spending an extra few days that I hadn’t counted on when it came to getting Bound and Hunted laid out for trade paperback.

At this point Bound is live in e-book form, Hunted (Dark Reflections #2—Adri’s story) is queued up to go live at the end of March, Driven (Jasmin’s post-Riven Reflections story) is out with my advance readers, and Dark Reflections #3 (Which absolutely blew Katie’s mind) is undergoing its first editing pass.

In other news, the forum has incredible information on it. If you haven’t stopped by yet, I’d encourage you to do so. Jenine, Janelle and Lauren have asked some really insightful questions and they’ve got some interesting theories about what is going to happen next. I stop by there at least every few days and answer questions. It’s headed towards being the exact kind of place that I always wished existed for my favorite series.

There really is some great stuff in store for you all. I’ve never seen my advance readers this excited before. They are loving where the story is going and I’m excited to be able to share this journey with all of you.

Stay tuned for another blog post sometime in the next few days.

Dean

I’ve been meaning to get another status update written for a couple of weeks now, but today is really the first chance that I’ve had to stop for long enough to sit down and take stock of where everything stands.

As you’ve already notice if you’re here reading this, this month I set up a new blog (which promptly fell over and had to be rebuilt). I also set up a new mailing list, which is superior to the old list in nearly every way and unlike most of the alternatives I was looking at, won’t cost me hundreds of dollars per year.

If any of you happen to be looking for a mailing list solution you should consider Sendy. You pay a one-time fee for the software, load it up to the web server that hosts your website, and then it uses Amazon’s infrastructure to actually send out the emails at a cost of just $1/10,000 emails. The real test of my installation will obviously come at the end of January when I announce the official release of Disillusioned, but so far everything seems to be working very well.

If you’re not very technical, Ben (the owner of Sendy) will install Sendy for you for a fairly modest fee.

In other news, I’ve loaded most of my titles up to Google Play, so that is an option for those of you who prefer to get your books there.

In writing news, November was National Novel Writing Month and since I was due to start another book the first of November I went ahead and participated in NaNoWriMo (or NaNo-Rhino as my oldest daughter calls it) this year.

Knowing that I was posting daily word counts where other people could see them was an incredible motivator and I finished Ben, Jasmin and Geoffrey’s book in record (for me at least) time. The rough draft weighed in at 105k words and I typed the last word on the 19th. Since I don’t write on Sundays that meant I completed it in just 16 working days for an average production of 6,500 words per day, which is the highest sustained writing production since last December when I was desperately trying to get Forsaken finished up before Christmas.

As you can probably tell, I’m pretty excited about how well this latest book came together. The extra 10 days or so of time in November was a big part of why I was able to take some time away from editing so that I could get the new website and mailing list up, so a banner production month like that couldn’t have come at a better time.

The other thing that I began experimenting with on this last book was splitting my writing up into 25-minute sessions and tracking my progress on a session by session basis. I’ve always tracked my daily production, but it did seem to make a difference to monitor my writing at a more granular level.

It probably sounds like I’m sharing all of this to brag (maybe a little, but I know there are lots of people out there that blow my production numbers out of the water), but the primary reason for sharing it is that it raises the possibility of more than 6 books per year. It’s still not set in stone, but the possibility is there. The other reason for sharing this particular accomplishment is that I know some of my readers have aspirations of finishing books of their own, and I thought it might be helpful for that crowd to see some of the things that are helping me get more work done in less time.

Changing gears again, Disillusioned (Dark Reflections 1) will go live on January 23rd and I think it is going to be a real treat for everyone. Some things are the same as Broken and Torn in the Dark Reflections timeline, but there are a lot of things that are incredibly different and all of those differences stem from one thing, one incredibly important difference that has changed the course of Alec and Adri’s world in profound ways.

Part of me wishes that I could just come right out and tell you all exactly what that difference is, but that would ruin half of the fun that I have in store for the series. There are still a lot of layers that I need to peel back before all is said and done.

I hope to be able to do a cover reveal post for Disillusioned a couple of weeks before the release date.

March 17th (don’t worry this is all listed on my New Release Schedule Page) will see the release of Hunted (the second Dark Reflections novel). Disillusioned was primarily about the differences in Alec’s life, Hunted is all about Adri.

I can usually tell how good of a job I’ve done on a given book based on my wife Katie’s response after she reads it. When I told Katie that Adri was going to get her own Dark Reflections book there wasn’t much excitement on Katie’s part, I think because she was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to keep a full-length novel about a ‘normal’ human exciting. I’m happy to say that the final product vastly exceeded Katie’s expectations.

She basically read it straight through, stopping only grudgingly to eat dinner and go to bed for the night. It’s been a while since one of my books grabbed Katie out of the gate like that and refused to let her go, so I think I’ve managed something extra special with this one! I can’t wait to see what all of you think of Hunted.

I’ll be releasing another Reflections book on May 29th, and this one will advance Ben and Jasmin’s storyline at the same time that it introduces Geoffrey to some of our favorite shape shifters. I’ll be dropping some pretty key hints in this book as to some of the things that are still in store for the series.

The next release (August 8th) will be the third Dark Reflections novel. This is the book that I just finished, so the jury is still out on it (I need to go back through it again before I give it to Katie to read) but there are some pretty important things that take place in this one as well. I made some good progress on strengthening one of the key relationships in the Dark Reflections books. That relationship is actually one of the main reasons that I initially set out to write the Dark Reflections series, so I’m incredibly excited to see it start to come together.

I also drop a major hint at the end of this most recent novel, a hint that reveals one of the layers of intrigue that I’ve been wanting to tell all of you about for more months than I care to think about.

I think that my book ‘pipeline’ is as strong as it has ever been and I’m looking forward to where the series goes from here.

I still have a major plot hurdle to work my way around, but I think that my next book will be Isaac’s story, after which I’ll either do the fourth Dark Reflections novel or I’ll write Jess’ story and peel back the curtain that has been hiding Wyatt’s origins.

Simultaneous to all of that, I’m working out what is going on with Alec, Adri and Rachel. Needless to say that I’m starting to worry that it’s all going to get hopelessly snarled in my head, but so far so good 🙂

I hope that you all are able to spend next week surrounded with friends and family and that you have a merry Christmas, or whatever the equivalent holiday is for you.

–Dean