Heather and I thought it would be fun to occasionally include little bits of our writing sessions, which we do from time to time, usually when we eat out. We don’t have lofty goals of 1,000 words a day like some writers (more power to them if they can keep that up), in fact on average our writing volume is probably less than a third of that. However, keep in mind that including Morrigan’s Brood: Dark Alliance, we have three fully-written novels in queue for publishing, and each of those will average around 370 pages. We have also written a novella, which we just sent to our editor Sally, half of a manuscript for a non-Morrigan’s Brood book that takes place in the same universe, and of course books six and seven (and perhaps 8 ) of the Morrigan’s Brood Series.
Since we are authors and operators of a small-press publishing company, Heather and I have to divide our time between writing, re-writing, marketing, promoting, publishing, working the day job, and living a life. I am sure if our original publisher had not gone out of business prior, which happened prior to our signing with them, we would be able to focus more of our time on writing, as we would not be running a publishing business. However, as many authors who are fellow members of various LinkedIn writing groups say, even traditionally published authors now share a burden for marketing and promotion, and many who still benefit from advances are electing to invest that money in marketing instead of pocketing it. There have been a few horror stories of authors who have collected their advances only to have to pay back the publisher because book sales were not high enough.
So back to last night… We had been working on scenes from Morrigan’s Brood: Odin’s Chosen (Book 6) for the last several months, but because somebody leaked out in this blog and other places that we would post prequels of Book 3 prior to its release, well somebody had to write that stuff. Therefore, last night, we began to write about what happened to Mandubratius after… (SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU HAVE NOT READ BOOK 2, DO NOT PROCEED)
(PROCEED ONLY IF YOU HAVE READ BOOK 2)
… his defeat against the Deargh Du. We spent the first fifteen to twenty minutes pitching ideas about when these blurbs would take place, how the scenes would evolve, what our end goal was, and which characters would be involved. One of the challenges is that 237 years passed between the end of Book 2 and the beginning of Book 3. Somewhere in that time frame, Mandubratius recovered and went on with his nefarious life, though as a changed man. When we start book 3, which you will get a glimpse of once I finish proofreading it, Mandubratius still has some… discomfort… from his ordeal, but hey… it’s been 237 years; surely he had been fixed up long ago. Right? Well, I don’t recall that we had gone into a lot of detail. Hence the need for these tidbits in between.
We are going to publish these blurbs right here after each blurb is completed. These will be in the form of scenes, much like we write our other books. We started with a table read, and then later, Heather will write on the computer based on her notes from the table read. Afterward, we will both re-write, and then I will proofread before we post. Once we have finished publishing each of these blurbs, I think we will combine all of the scenes into a brief novella and share that as a free read. I might even look into a print version if anyone is interested.
Anyway, stay tuned for more stuff.
Cheers!
Christopher