Writing Update: My Upcoming Book

Almost a year has passed since I announced Project Nightshade, a dark fantasy book about a young girl looking for her lost memories in a magical world. The plan was to publish the book in a year, however, plans changed, such is life. The biggest change is I’m not publishing the same book that I started out writing.  

There were a lot of false starts as I started on the road towards publication. Having the idea for the novel was easy and starting to write it was easy. But finishing the book? That was really hard. I ended up not focusing on the original idea and looking at other possible things to write for my first book, all of it to no avail. One thing I’ve learned in the past year is that I can crank out ideas and first drafts like crazy, but it's revising those ideas and drafts that I have difficulty doing, especially when they are in the form of a 50,000-word novel. 

 In the process of juggling project ideas, I came across a manuscript that I started on a couple of years ago which was an epic fantasy novel. I quit writing it because it was going to have to be close to 100,000 words if I wanted to effectively tell the story that I had in mind. But a 100,000-word novel is overwhelming, and fear and intimidation kept me from continuing the project.

Then I heard about something called short reads, which are very popular on Amazon. Instead of writing full-length novels, many authors publish short stories and novellas and sell them as books. They come out with entire series of short stories consisting of books that are 20,000, 10,000, and even 5,000 words each. It’s a viable option for someone who wants to get their feet wet publishing a book without having to go through the rigor of crafting an entire novel.

So I decided that I was going to publish a short read. I took the bones of my epic fantasy novel and started crafting shorter works out of it. I started writing new stories based on the world that I created, and now I have several projects on my hard drive that can be used for short reads. They still need a good deal of editing, but the option is before me if I choose to take it. 

By late August or early September, I plan to publish my first book. It will be a short read, a novelette, between 13,000 and 15,000 words, which I think will put it between 35-50 pages. I have had several beta readers look at the piece, and I am now in the revision process. By next week I hope to send the book off to an editor and spend the rest of the summer editing it, formatting it for self-publication, and making a book cover for it. 

I am beyond excited to have this project completed and to have my first book published. The book is heavily inspired by Skyrim and Dungeons and Dragons, and if you are a fan of Tolkien, Salvatore, or the Sword and Sorcery genre, chances are that you will enjoy it. I’ll have more about my book out soon, but in the meantime be sure to check back here for updates. You can also like my Facebook page, Author David B. Corder for more updates.  

This article was originally published in The People-Sentinel.

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