Goal Setting and an Update of the Ebon Maw
It’s been a busy morning of me totally not procrastinating and getting to work on any of the 3 manuscripts I’m supposed to be working on. Nope. No procrastination at all! I’ve just been updating my social media to say that I’m not sure what to post on Instagram, wrestling with what to write here, having to completely rewrite what I’d written here because I was an idiot and hit the wrong button and lost everything, and then wrote this huge run-on sentence when I could be working instead.
Seriously though, that’s actually the gist of how my morning has gone. I’ve been trying to decide what sort of content I should create for Instagram and Threads (let’s be real, Twitter/X is dead, and Facebook is a dinosaur), and then when I went to publish today’s blog here, I hit the wrong button and deleted everything. So yeah. Cursed morning.
Anyway, my writing goal for the week remains the same. I have 3 projects I’m actively working on (a middle-grade monster academia, a dark young adult urban fantasy that’s paranormal romance adjacent, and young adult contemporary drama). I’m taking inspiration from Stephen King to work on a pages-per-day rate instead of words-per-day, which has been very helpful and productive. There has been, however, a small complication: Ebon Maw is back.
Last week I said I was pausing it because I wasn’t sure what was going on over in the magazine in light of the shakeups that hit it back at the beginning of summer. Long story short, they lost my email. Perfectly understandable given the current situation they’re in. So yeah. The last chapter of The Curse of the Ebon Maw (Chapter Twelve) officially went live on Saturday. Sorry for the delay. That leads us to the update though.
Given the current state of the magazine, I am going to be reducing my post rate from 1 per month to 1 every other month for the time being while they rebuild their team and catch up on their backlog. This is a choice I am making and was not asked to do so, and is meant to be my way of helping. Meanwhile, I will begin uploading updated, revised, and new/additional chapters of The Curse of the Ebon Maw arc I here in the near future. Publication start date TBD.
I’ve actually really wanted to get back to those early chapters because there was a lot about them that was left to be desired. At least, on my end as the author, there were. For instance, I have always hated, hated, how I had Mira pledge to Echo so quickly. That’s just the first example that I could think of, and it has ground on me for a while. In addition to revised chapters, there will also be new chapters that I skipped/cut from the initial run for one very simple reason: I got sick of writing them! Seriously, write the same arc for 20 months straight and see how thrilled you are to get back to it. By the end there, I was speed running just to get the hell out of it! So yeah, now you know why those last few chapters feel kind of rushed, and why I didn’t even touch on some plot threads.
So yeah. That’s my monkey wrench. A very big project that went mothballs decided it didn’t want to stay mothballed for even a week! Aagh! So now, on top of my minimum manuscript pages a day, I’ll need to be logging 750 words a day in that at least until I am done with Arc II. And yes, that is my writing rate for Ebon Maw: 750 words per day 4 days per week against a 3,000 word-per-chapter cap with a 5th day dedicated to a quick editing session.
Alright. That’s enough procrastinating for one morning. Time to get to it.
