Sharrukin's Palace

The last two weeks have been busy.

After almost three months of lockdown at home, I’m finally starting to do a significant amount of telework for my day job, revising and re-designing one of my more popular courses. We’re hoping to get that online for students by the end of July, so there’s a lot of work to be done there.

Meanwhile, I’ve gotten a good start on the second draft of The Curse of Steel. The goal here was to back the beginning of the story up by about two days, giving me a chance to do a lot more character development and exposition before throwing Krava into the middle of the action. I’ve just finished the third chapter of this new material, after which I’m going to be rewriting existing text rather than coming up with new.

I think it’s clear that I was overly optimistic to think that I would be one-third of the way through the draft by now. By the end of June, it’s probably going to be more like 15% or so. Still, I’ll have more than enough material to get past my self-imposed limit of “at least 10,000 words of solid content before I release anything to my patrons.”

All of which is to say, there will be a charged release on my Patreon by the end of June, which will consist of roughly the first 5-6 chapters of the revised draft of The Curse of Steel. All of my patrons, from the $1 level up, will get a copy of the PDF. If you’re interested in signing up as a patron and seeing this draft as it emerges, feel free to click on the Patreon link in the sidebar.

Just a quick status report today. After a few months of world-building work, I’ve finally gotten started with the second draft of The Curse of Steel.

How quickly this goes depends on a lot of things. Although I’m still not going into the office, and probably won’t be doing that on a regular basis for some time yet, I have started doing some day-job work from home. Work on the novel is going to have to compete for time. Still, I hope to be able to finish this draft by the end of August, then prepare the novel for release in the September-October timeframe.

If things go according to plan, patron rewards for June, July, and August will consist of chunks of the revised draft, about a dozen chapters at a time. As always, if anyone’s interested in seeing that material as I release it, click on the Patreon link in the sidebar. All of my patrons, $1 level and up, will get to see sections of the draft. Patrons at the $2 level and up will get a free copy of the finished e-book when that’s done.