The State of Things
Hailing frequencies open…
Well, it’s my birthday this week, and it’s nearly the one-year mark since Zee Locked In went live on Amazon. Despite many of the struggles in the larger world, it’s been an amazing year for me. To be honest, I was built for a global pandemic, because all I really want to do is stay home anyways.
Zee is still out there moving copies and doing well enough for the first book from a new indie author. I’m not making enough to say that I’m “making a living” but it’s a decent little side hustle, and I can see that it might be possible. We were at a kid’s birthday party over the weekend, and inevitably while talking to the adults the question came up of “what do you do?” And while my first response was to say, “I’m a stay-at-home dad” it was very encouraging to have my wife chime in to add, “and an author.” Which raised some eyebrows and lead to some further conversation.
Our son just had his 2 1/2 year well-baby check-up today and walked away with a clean bill. That said, the last couple of months have been a struggle with him. Naps have become a hit-or-miss thing, and even as I write this, he’s back in his room resisting his nap by walking around his room in circles. Until recently, most of my writing has been getting done while he naps, and there was a stretch of several months where I could get an hour or two of mostly uninterrupted work in. Lately, that’s dwindled down to 15-minute chunks for maybe a total of 45 minutes while I try to coax the kid into sleeping. It’s impossible to get any momentum like that, and I guess that’s why I’m working on this blog post at the moment instead of trying to bang out a couple of hundred words.
Book 2 is nearing completion, but as described above my time to work on it has been running away from me. I’d say it’s like 85% done on the second draft. Most of my first draft ended up getting split into two separate books, which means when I finally do finish Book 2, I’ll have a large portion of the first draft work done on Book 3 already. The hope is that I should have Book 3 out within less than a year, versus Book 2 which is going to take over a year (shooting for December at this point). While I think the series will be longer, I think books 1-3 will make a nice little trilogy within the series. You can see a good chunk of what I’ve got on Book 2 so far over on Royal Road if you’re curious.
Well, I guess that’s about it. I’m gonna go try to wrestle this kid to sleep, then maybe try to squeeze out a couple of hundred words on Book 2 before nap time is over (plus eat and shower). I’m planning on doing a little Top 10 blog post of books I’ve enjoyed over the last year. I’ve been doing a ton of audiobooks, mostly all indie authors, and it would be nice to promote them instead of myself.
Hailing frequencies closed.
