When you publish your own work, you have a lot of balls to keep in the air. You have to keep writing, first and foremost, but you also have to keep up the sales work, illicit opinions and reviews, get a feel for how the work is being received, so on and so forth. As much as I like to travel, seeing new places and reconnecting with acquaintances, this can eat in to those other tasks.

That said, did I mention Cold Iron is still available for sale? Because it totally still is.

I’ve made some progress on Cold Streets, and I have a fairly good notion on when I’m going to wrap the first draft. It’s important to set deadlines: you always want to have a goal to shoot for, and in my case, it provides a timeline to which I feel I must adhere. It can be difficult for me to manage my time properly, and establishing deadlines helps with that. I’m at the stage where I’m picturing certain key scenes in my head, and just need to fill in the blanks between them on paper.

Having made Cold Streets my primary writerly focus for the time being, other projects have been put aside but are still fairly important to me. I’ve been thinking about the serial nature of old-school pulp sci-fi, and since my idea for that genre hews closely to those sensibilities, I’m toying with the idea of posting the project serially here, or perhaps in a separate webspace, in lieu of these writer reports.

Leave a comment to tell me what you think of this idea. Would you be interested to read some slightly old-school pulp science fiction instead of this somewhat dry blow-by-blow of my writing progress every week? Or is it a bad idea to split my focus? I need your thoughts, Internet.

I’ve never really considered myself a salesman. Yet, that is one of the many hats one has to wear when publishing one’s own work. It’s probably part of what deters some folks from taking that step: not only do you have to write the thing, revise it until it’s decent, and get some lovely volunteers to test read and copyedit the work, you have to take care of the marketing, publication, and sales of the book. Nobody’s going to do it for you.

That said, how did the first week of Cold Iron‘s sales go? Pretty decently, I must say.

It’s my first published work ever so I didn’t expect things to be big or brisk in the sales department. But the initial trends seem relatively promising. I’m certain there will be more reviews coming in, and good or bad, I’ll be sure to tweet them. I think the most important thing I can do, other than the occasional reminder that the book’s on sale, is keep writing the next one.

My goal is to have Cold Streets done, if not available for sale, by the end of the year. I have most of it plotted out, though I still need to work out some of the more granular logistics of certain things. I’m expanding the PoV characters to four, one of whom is a direct antagonist, and my hope is that changing up the dynamic in this way will keep things fresh and exciting for my readers.

I have some ideas on how to rewrite Cities of Light (yes, again) to even further divorce it from extant young adult fantasy novels. I’m going to keep jotting down notes and outline points until I get a coherent structure together. It’s pretty much a side project to the novellas, which appear to be more straightforward affairs.

And then there’s the pulp science fiction thing. I’m wondering if there’s a way I can get myself started on that in such a way that it captures that episodic feeling of old movie serials but conveys my interest in good characters and new takes on old themes. I’ll be pondering this over the weekend while working on Cold Streets.

Always be writing, folks. Always be writing.