February flew by, except for a week when I had a young German Sheppard, who was a lot of energy and wanted to play with the other dogs fairly constantly, which is very distracting for a writer.
In dog news, my Rover profile has hit sixty-two 5-star reviews. I’ve made it a little goal to get one hundred five-star ratings by September, which is roughly a year since I’ve been with Rover.
In rock climbing news, sadly, Matthew broke his thumb at the beginning of February, so he had to take time off of rock climbing. I decided to take some time off too, since my shoulder was bugging me. Three weeks wasn’t enough to completely heal, but it’s getting better and I’m hopeful more strength training will square it away. I went back to climbing for the first time today (Monday). Some movements hurt, but I don’t think I made it worse.
Writing Status
Despite the distraction of an energetic dog and spending tons of time learning about Kickstarter, the month of writing went pretty well. Read below for an update on how Date of Death is coming along in its first draft.
I launched the Kickstarter! Weeks of learning about the platform and preparing the graphics and tiers and I felt comfortable enough to move forward. It was a ton of work and the Facebook group for Kickstarter for Authors was a lot of help. Military Fiction isn’t very popular on Kickstarter at the moment, but I have enough people that want to support it to have hit over 170% of my funding goal! If you helped back the project, thank you!
The 170% unlocked the first stretch goal of a short story collection set in the Genesis world! I’m looking forward to adding this to my projects for 2024. It might delay other projects, but it’s worth it.
If you’d like to support my Kickstarter, it’s not too late! Click here.
Books on the Go
The Genesis Project:
Cover Art: It’s on social and it’s the logo for this post!
Manuscript: A couple of friends proofread the final draft for grammatical errors and I just got the physical books back. I’ll be spending the next week or so making the final edits to the book, and adding a little extra.
Armageddon’s Descendants – Book 1: The Collective
Manuscript: Not much of an update on this one. I’m editing book one when I’m not working on Genesis. I’m a few chapters in but I’m loving the story. It feels fresh after a long break from it. I’m also reading what I wrote so far from book two, but it’s not great, so I may be starting over from scratch on Book 2 after I plot out the trilogy a bit more.
Unlocking the Dead:
Manuscript: Dead in the water. You can read this post for what happened there. The short version is that the developmental edit came back and there were too many problems to fix right now.
Knights of Truipis:
Manuscript: The first draft is completed. I’ll go back to this one likely in 2025.
Date of Death:
Manuscript: I’ve reached 75,000 words in the first draft of the manuscript. Up 17,000 words since end January. With the amount I accomplished in February, I’m pretty happy with those numbers. The book is almost done in its first draft from one character’s point of view. I might shelf the book before writing the next POV to focus on Armageddon’s Descendants.
February Update for Dogs!
