Cartographer wanted.

Dear Reader,

They say 'heavy is the head that wears the crown.' What they really should have said was 'full is the head that dreams up stories.' I am becoming increasingly exasperated with how afar afield I have gotten in my side writing from the main story lines of the Umbrel Chronicles. Not much of it is really ready to share just yet. But it is things like Dacia's War and the Iron Lily, side stories that take place in the world but are not directly related to the main story of the books.

I have been going through old notebooks and finding stories that I have written. I have so much material set in this world. It ranges from scenes of a few hundred words to almost a novella's worth of aborted attempts to work around plot problems. I feel like I am lost and wandering through the wilds of some other world. Unfortunately, there is no map. And I have the misfortune of being the native guide. It makes you, my fellow travelers through this little world, have a rather bumpy journey. For that I'd like to apologize.

As I am working on getting my life organized and everything ready for 2019, I have come to a few conclusions. One of them is that I am going to share some of the material from my old notebooks. Secondly, I am going to finish the Iron Lily and Dacia's War this up coming year and offer them complete as ebooks. You have been far too patient and I really need to get past my loathing of certain characters (like that uppity priestess of Julara who thinks she's better than the high priestess) to write the story. I will be returning to my schedule of posting updates to the serial stories on Tuesdays and Thursdays as of the first full week of January.

I will also be releasing ebooks over the next few months of the first trilogy in the series. I anticipate book four (which is a novella) being ready come spring. It will be released as both an ebook and a paperback. Book five is almost finished its round of edits. I hope to have it ready for release in autumn. By then, I think I will finally have finished the damn work on book seven so that I can get busy with editing that.

My plans for NaNoWriMo '19? Glad you asked, write book eight. Who knows, maybe I'll get luck and finish book seven over the next two months and get book eight done during Camp NaNoWriMo. Either way, next year two books are coming out in the Umbrel Chronicles, come hell or high water. Since I live on a hill, I expect that if Satan's knocking on my door, he's looking for a signed copy of both books. I'll have to remind him that he owes me a few months rent. That's prime real estate down there. It'd be a shame to have to kick the poor guy out over a few bucks.