Time has once again gotten away from me. The last time I did a status update was back in November and a lot has happened since then. In 2013 I wrote just over 581,000 words and released 3 novels. In 2014 I wrote a bit more than 795,000 words and released 7 novels.

My goal for 2015 is a million words. That’s a lot of writing, but with my recent changes to my workflow, the incorporation of speech recognition software into my process to save my wrists, and trimming away some of the less-valuable tasks that I’ve historically spent time on, I think it should be possible, but it means that I’m going to have to make some changes that I’ve been considering.

The main change is that, I’m going to stop publishing a release date for most of my books. I can see situations where it still might be worthwhile to announce a release date 6-9 months in advance of a book going live, but right now it just doesn’t make a lot of sense. My release schedule has a couple of months of slack in it so that I know I can make the release dates even if I get sick, have an emergency in the family, or life otherwise throws us a curveball.

Eliminating the pre-announced release dates means that I can just release each book as soon as it is finished with the editing and formatting process, which means that all of you will get to read the books sooner than you otherwise would.

That means it’s more important than ever to sign up for my mailing list as that will be the main channel by which I let all of you know that I’ve released another book out into the wild.

As of right now, I have all three of the Awakening Series books finished (as far as the writing side of things goes) and am working them through the editing and formatting process. I also have the 5th Dark Reflections book written and I’ve also finished the 1st and 2nd books in a new, dystopian series that I’m very excited about.

I’m currently coming around the home stretch on the first book in a new YA PNR romance series (like Broken or Reborn) (the working title right now is Stoneskin) that I’m hoping to finish up before the end of the month. Once that happens, I’ll have a rather tricky decision ahead of me.

I still need to write Jess’ story in Reflections, finish up the dystopian trilogy, or write the second and third book in the new PNR series (Stoneskin) I’m working one. There are positives and negatives to all of those options, so I haven’t been able to pick between them all yet—I suspect it will just come down to which book feels the most ready to write in the back of my mind.

Katie and I are still hard at work trying to get all of the Reflections books in out print, which is still turning out to be much more involved than we expected given that we’ve done other print books in the past, but I think we’re starting to close in on having the first 2 or 3 just right.

I’ll try to keep you posted on where I go from here.

Thanks,

Dean