The Waiting Game

I did it! I finally handed in my manuscript for Black Earth: The Broken Daisy to my editor at the end of last week. This freed me up to continue work on formatting Black Earth: End of the Innocence for ebook editions on Smashwords. I was having some major problems formatting my Word doc and thought I might end up having to 'nuke' my manuscript - essentially strip it of all its formatting and then go back in and put it all back in - but God willing I was able to get it to work right today. Now I'm just waiting for approval from Smashwords so I can get my ISBN #'s and finalize the ebooks.

*Big sigh of relief* Finishing BE: TBD was a challenge - it is the largest novel I have ever written and/or tried to publish - and I actually came across points where I didn't even know if the book would get finished because the story kept expanding. Now that it is done, I just have to wait for my editor to finish her work on it before I can move forward in self-publishing it. I'm stuck in a waiting period with the ebook too, as the people at Smashwords look my manuscript over to make sure I did everything right with the ebook.

With all of this waiting, I'm left questioning what direction to go now. I do need to work on the cover design for BE: TBD, but my wife needs to help me with that and she works the first half of this week. I need to market my novels more, find some creative ways to get more people to purchase and/or read BE: EOTI so I can get some reader reviews/blurbs to post on my website. I also have the Expired Reality series to overhaul which is guaranteed to be a pretty big project in itself - 2 novels to be re-edited, 1 novel to be rewritten, and a novella that I need to find a place for. There's The LZR Project (which is an extension of the Expired Reality series), which I wanted to release months ago, but the drafts aren't even finished for that yet. I have dozens of books staring at me, books that have been waiting to be read, to be explored, to be perused - Tosca Lee's Demon: A Memoir, Brent Weeks' Way of Shadows and even Koushun Takami's Battle Royale are among the masses.

On top of all that, I have another special project I have been wanting to work on for quite a while now regarding another character in my Expired Reality series. Alas, that one will have to wait a bit until all of the forementioned is finished. No rest for a creator of worlds.