I’ve finished my final editing pass on Echoes of Chaos, and it’s off to the editor. After editing I cut a few thousand words, but that’s all. That puts it at approximately 155,000 words, which I’m pretty happy with. I expect to get back the edited version in the next week and a half or so, but the release date of April 6th is going to stay where it is. That’ll give plenty of time for Podium to get started on their part, and for me to set up sales via other channels.

In the meantime, I’m taking 1-2 days off to decompress, then I’ll be working on Silent Songstress, one of the books I’ve talked about publishing under a pen name since it’d have erotic content. To be clear, here are the reasons I’m planning on putting it under a pen name, but it’ll be shown on this website, announced here, and all of that:

• I’m easily embarrassed by the content, so having it separated (slightly) is a bit of a relief.
• It keeps readers from being surprised by the erotic content. It’d be one thing if I’d put that sort of content into my books from the beginning and chose not to put those scenes in some books, but adding them after the fact might surprise readers strikes me as inconsiderate.
• Like the above, the last thing I want is for an audiobook with said content to surprise someone who’s listening to it in a semi-public area. I’ve heard of it happening, and one of my artists once mentioned she listens to audiobooks while painting.

Anyway, I already have ~71,000 words on Silent Songstress, and I expect it only needs 4-6 more chapters, so it shouldn’t take too much work to finish the rough draft. After that, I’m still debating between finishing my Embers of War trilogy and the next Talyn’s Saga book for my following project. We’ll see when I get to it. But there you go!