Good News and Bad News
Hello, friends, I have some news on the status of my writing and everything else so I wanted to give you some info so you’re in the loop.
The Good
I always prefer getting the bad news first because I’m a pessimist, but the bad news doesn’t really make a lot of sense without the good news so you’re getting that first.
The first draft of Growing Pains, the next Silas & Bundersnoot novel, is finished and clocks in at around 57,000 words. It’s been about six months of work for me, and I know it definitely needs edits so that’ll be the next step in the project. Unfortunately that’s all the good news I have at this time.
Well that and we finally captured the groundhog and have relocated it to a local woodland. Hopefully my wife’s vegetables will be safe now.
The Bad
So the bad is that while the draft is finished, that’s all that’s finished and the book is a long way from being complete. Ordinarily I would start making plans for a Kickstarter at this point but I have concerns for a couple of reasons. The first is that with the state of…everything right now I know a lot of people are struggling financially. We barely scraped over the finish line last year with the Kickstarter and that was with a lot of help from friends and family. Things have only gotten tighter for everyone since last year. Plus, with tariffs and the suspension of package delivery to the US I’m not sure if I’d even be able to offer physical books to our international friends. There are a lot of things that are just up in the air right now for a lot of us.
That brings me to the second problem, which is that I’m also starting classes in a couple weeks. Nothing exciting, just trying to get some training in so I can switch day jobs. This is on top of me working overtime because my current job decided to lay off 10% of our staff last year and oh look we don’t have enough people now. I don’t know how much additional work that’s going to add and I could end up in a giant pile of burnout. Unfortunately I won’t know until I’m in the thick of it so I can’t give you an answer.
I know that’s a lot of concerns and caveats and I wish I had better news for y’all. However I want to assure you I will not be giving up on writing, it just may end up on the back burner for a bit.
Your friend, in books and trains,
— Kalpar