Weekly Update - 9/7/22 (Patreon)

I have safely returned to my northern California home, and am now officially testing Covid free, although I'm still a little bit jet lagged and probably will be for another day or two, simply because I'm still catching up on the contract work I had to get done while I had Covid. Most of that day job stuff is done, but there's still some odds and ends I'm dealing with, and that's eating into my work time here a bit.

I dropped the most recent chapter of Brewster's Brood just a few minutes ago, having dropped the profile yesterday. The next thing in the queue is Before The Storm 2, which I literally haven't even started on yet, so there's a good chance it'll be Saturday (9/10) or Sunday (9/11) before it drops, but it'll be meaty. I've been doing all the plotting for that in my head for weeks now, and I have a sneaking suspicion that when it comes time to write it, it'll just come flowing out, but I have got to get last month's commissions done first, and so that'll be the next couple of days worth of work. I still owe 1 private commission, Devil's Details 5 and McCallister's Madness 3 to those commissioners for last month, but losing almost two weeks to Covid wasn't in my goddamn plans. On the plus side, I've got maybe a page or two into each of those already.

I had genuinely intended to get a lot more work done on the Europe trip, but let me tell you, Covid is a bitch and a half, and there's about five days there that I have only the vaguest of recollections of. If you're going out in public, indoors among large numbers of people, you might feel silly still wearing a mask, but you do not want to catch what I had, believe you me.

The advantage for all of next week's stuff is that I have a headstart on some of it. I'm already about ten pages into Breakpoint 1 which will drop on 9/13 for Tier 2 and above subscribers. It's not finished yet, but I've done a lot of the legwork already, so it won't be too hard to come back and finish that off with another five to ten pages, and it will be a big meaty opener full of all the things people want from one of my stories, and a few things that will definitely surprise you.

 For those of you who don't remember, Breakpoint will be the second Tier 2+ story running here, and will not be available publicly, at least not until it's released in novel format in, what, a few years' time? I pitched it as part The Prisoner, part Lost, part The Bourne Identity, part A-Team and a whole lot more. A great big sexy spy story where we don't cut away any time people are shagging. 

As for what I'm writing for 9/16, well, the votes are still coming in on that, and we'll see where it ends up. Remember, Tier 4s and up get the chance to decide twice a month what I'm writing, and be sure to cast your votes. It's usually decided by 1-2 votes, so every vote definitely counts.

9/20 will be Quaranteam: McCallister's Madness 2 and 9/23 is currently the scheduled date for Quaranteam 50, marking the end of book one, although I may be a day or two late on that, since I very much want to get that right. I'll probably throw up The Devil's Details 3 sometime around there as well, so there's work out while I'm making sure I nail the landing in QT50.

As stressed, I'm going to be spending a good part of October doing The Great Edit Pass and cleaning up all of QT Book One for publication, which is still planned for November sometime, although might slip into December. There's lots to be done, including hammering down the timeline a lot more firmly, which I'll be doing probably by setting an actual date/time for each chapter, much like I've been doing in Brewster's Brood, but I haven't finalized that idea yet. I'm also likely to fill out the first several chapters a little more, give them a second pass, considering how far we've come since then.

And, as per usual, here's the list of what's coming to the free sites and when.  9/10 - QT 45 (as well as Cast of Characters), 9/17 - Threadbinders 4, 9/24 - QTPT8, 10/1 - Before The Storm 1, 10/8 - QT: Piper's Prelude 3.

Anyway, would love to chat more, but I'm still struggling like hell to get caught up on everything, and on top of everything, it's a literal fucking HEATWAVE here in NorCal right now. Yesterday the temp maxed out at 112F. Today and tomorrow it's only supposed to top out at 101F. The heat suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks. Time to grab lunch and get to work hammering on commissions before I head off to my regular Wednesday poker night, at my friend's house, where it's airconditioned. (No, most of the places in the Bay aren't airconditioned. Yes, it sucks.)