I’m not talking about words or research this week. This week marks release #3 for the year. Broadsides Book 3, Blood & Nerve, is now available on Amazon at the sale price of $2.99USD. To celebrate the release, Books 1 and 2, Voice & Vein and Sunlight & Bone, have been discounted to $0.99USD.
Anyone who’s been following me closely will note that this is actually missing a book. My previous two releases included a new book for Base Seven too. It turns out that production schedule was too fast to sustainably keep. I don’t regret doing it, even though I knew it probably would be; but I’m not nearly known enough for backtracking to have a major impact yet, so I thought it was better to reach far to find my limits than hold back.
Base Seven is still in production. This just means that it’s not going to be every quarter, though I am hoping for the next. Next quarter is going to be interesting in the Chinese-proverb sense of the word, since I’ve been going for long enough now to start running into the mental stages of denial. You know, the ones that erupt when you’ve worked on a new habit long enough that your brain goes ‘wait, you mean you were serious?’
Well, I say ‘start’. I suspect I’ve been in the middle of them for a couple of months now, and it’s slowed things down considerably.
As it turns out, scheduling is hard, and working to a production schedule is even harder. Even more so when I’m not totally sure where my limits really lie. This release is a week later than I actually wanted, and I needed every bit of it.
Last blog post I talked about dissonance between what I think I’m capable of and what I’m actually capable of. I’m finding more and more that time isn’t as much of a factor as energy and the ability to overcome inertia, and I have just enough mild but chronic physical conditions to make it hard to tell the difference between a genuine need to rest and my brain being sulky about getting exercise.
I’ve read that a consistent schedule is an unbreakable rule. That scares me a bit, because it sets the stakes high from the off, in a ‘one mistake and you’re toast’ kind of way. I’ve never liked those kinds of ultimatums. And the pressure rarely actually helps.
I’m still aiming for a mid-November release to match the rest, at least for now, and keeping an eye on anything I might need to switch up. There’s some things I can account for right now, and am. Some of those involve restrictions where I might previously have disdained them. For instance, books in a series seem to get longer as the series goes on, and I’m no exception. Schedule-wise, books getting longer tends to mean they take time away from writing the next — so now my co-author and I get to practice writing to a limit, and still tell a whole story. I’m actually kind of excited about this; it’s a new skill for me, and the learning of it will help my future self. Win-win, right there.
But for right now, I’ve hit my third release of the year, and Blood & Nerve makes the fifth book released. That’s a long way from where I was at the start of the year.
By this time next year I hope to look back and have it seem tiny. I’m looking forward to it.
Aurichalcum Publishing 