Allan Joyal: Blog

Well, chapter 15 of A Woman Warrior is now available. The scary thing is how quickly this chapter came together. I honestly did not realize how many words I had written until I checked it at the end and found that I had exceeded my daily goal with just the one chapter. And to make it even more surprising, this was after achieving my usual daily goal writing one of the stories that I'm preparing for posting via Kindle Direct Publishing.

So my muse appears to be happily dancing in my head for the moment. May she remain for a while so that you all can receive more wonderful stories.

I'm always nervous about posting that I have resumed writing because my muse can be extremely fickle. She might be around for today, but tomorrow she could decide that its time to once again take the left turn at Albuquerque and leave me feeling completely drained whenever I open up one of my stories thinking to add a few more words.

But until that happens, I'm writing. I am concentrating a bit more on stories that meet Amazon's publishing rules which means that stories in the Swarm Cycle universe don't work. But I want to reward my fans so I have been trying to give A Woman Warrior a few hours every couple of days. Don't expect a huge explosion of posting, but I should get a chapter every 4-8 days for right now.

And I actually have a semi-companion piece that I may work on. It is for a different person, but takes place on the Princess Victoria on the same journey that Tanya and her companions are currently on. It just involves citizens who are destined for Kelor and the Patrician flotilla being set up there, so Tanya and her companions don't interact with them directly. It has some fun characters though. at least I liked them when I worked on it long, long, long, long ago. (Yes, I've got stories I started work on too many years ago. My muse has really been absent for too long.)

I get the occasional message asking if I'm still writing. The answer to that is a bit complex, so I decided to try to write about it here.

First, yes, I am still writing, but its been slow. I do have a full time job outside writing, so most of my writing is on evenings and weekends when I can convince myself to take a few hours to sit and type, and that doesn't always happen.

Then there is the question of what am I working on. I'll be honest, the Swarm Cycle tales have not been at the front of the queue. I do plan on finishing them. I enjoy writing about the world and it can be fun. Unfortunately, while I know my fans here enjoy those tales, they aren't ones that can be published on Amazon (at least not without some major adjustments.) So while I will try to remember to add chapters to A Woman Warrior and other stories in the universe, I'm not going to promise to put those first.

I do have one book ready for editing, if I can find an editor I can work with. Its a sci-fi tale in a new universe that I came up with a few years ago.

Beyond that I'm mostly switching between 2 different tales that also are in new universes. (the train of thought derailed a few years ago, jumped onto a new track and seems to have kidnapped my muse in the process.) I've been working on one the past week or so, but its just 16K words in so its a long, long way from completion.

But that's what's up. I do appreciate the messages even if I've been abnormally slow at responding. Life definitely threw me a number of curve balls in the last 3 years and I'm still trying to get back to an equilibrium I can be comfortable in.

Write that is. Hopefully a lot and of high quality. But that's the problem, how does one keep the output up. I'm not sure I ever figured that out, although so far this month I have had a better than average daily output. I need more though, so that my loving readers have something.

Not sure when the next chapter of A Woman Warrior will be ready. I know what i want to say, just need to get to it and I'm trying really hard on finishing other stories, so.... We shall see Xur. :P

I'm still trying very hard to get more books written, which means only a limited amount of time to work on stories for here, but I promise that I'll get another chapter of A Woman Warrior out soon.