Happy National Novel Writing Month, everyone!

If you’re a writer and participating, I hope the start of this month is going well. If not, well, I hope it’s a good month all the same. As I wrote a few weeks ago, I’ve decided to cut down on my blog posts for a while. I’m only posting once a month as I focus my efforts on more creative output. Again, I may occasionally post an extra blog piece or two on a topic I feel like writing about, but I feel I want to move away from writing about behind-the-scenes information as much, unless it’s necessary. And as it happens, there are a few updates I feel are necessary to dive into this month. 

First, if you follow me on social media, you’ll notice I came up short this Inktober. Disappointing, I know. I still plan to finish the series of Alice in Wonderland pieces, but October wound up being a month filled with an overabundance of important tasks.

Throughout the month, I was both preparing for NaNoWriMo and doing Inktober, whilst reading two books: John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story and Alice in Wonderland. Since Alice in Wonderland won the Inktober vote, I wanted to make sure I read the book (I’ve only seen various film adaptations) to do the set justice. However, I was already in the middle of Truby’s book (which I’d only recently learned about) when the vote came in, and I felt it was going to be essential to better planning this year’s NaNoWriMo. So it was sort of a perfect storm, and I did the best I could.

Additionally, I had a few other things working behind the scenes. Boring business stuff, which included planning for 2019 (which should be an interesting year for me, and I’ll post about that in the future), teaching myself to use Adobe InDesign (for laying out books–again, more on that in the future), and registering Dark Fire Press as an LLC. That last one appeared on both Gentleman Cthulhu: Twice the Fears and Cheers and my 2017 Inktober sketchbook, if you have copies of either and is the label I’ll be using for any self-published work from now on. I even put together a website (still in-progress) at darkfirepress.com.

So, it was a tall order for October, no doubt, but I stayed on top of it as best I could.

As for NaNoWriMo, I’m a bit of a rebel this year. The idea is to write a single 50,000 word novel within the month of November; however, I’m attempting three different projects because the main one, a horror novella titled The Kirklyn Horror, might not work out to the 50,000 word minimum. So, I’ve added in a second novella, and a two-part comic story (I write very wordy scripts) into the mix to round off the 50K word count, if necessary. We’ll see what happens.

Plus, as I fell short last year (due largely to poor planning, but it was my first attempt), with a few smaller works, even if I don’t meet the 50,000 word count, I should still come out of the month with at least one finished work.

That said, I’m well aware of the catch up that needs to be done on Gentleman Cthulhu, as well as the seemingly non-existent news about Chadhiyana (though check out chadhiyana.com tomorrow for a new piece of art), but behind the scenes things are moving along in those areas too. My Patreon supporters were recently treated to a three-part update on the remaining plans for this year and next year. Access to posts begins at just $1 per month (patreon.com/jmdesantis.com), so if you’d like to read through more of that, please do join. It’ll help me with some upcoming projects (to be announced soon) as well as Chadhiyana and Gentleman Cthulhu.

That said, keep checking back and be patient. As I told my patrons, things are going to be a bit touch and go through February, most likely. After that, everything should balance out, and I’ll have more solid news and updates to share.

If that’s a bit cryptic, well, stay tuned. All will be made clear in the end.

Cheers!