Mayor of Noobtown

 Book 5 Good news and bad news.  The Good news is that Book 5 is progressing well and all of my beta readers have decided that it isn't terrible.  One even thinks it is the best one yet.  My writing is matured and the fart jokes are far more intricate than ever before.   The bad news is that I'm slipping on my dates and my effort to have 3 books out this year is rapidly fading.  My expectation at this point is the second week of Jan.  You may not know it, but I work to support our valiant health care workers and that means I've been busy lately.  That had been complicating my writing and editing schedule.   One of these books I'll be able to quit and go full time, but I wouldn't feel right leaving everyone in the lurch with the pandemic about so I'm trying to do everything.  Slowly.   I do have the cover for Book 5 and it is great.  I can't wait to release my next book and let you guys read through the next arc o...

 Noobtown 5 Draft Status The editor is chomping at it.  I'm taking a second pass at a few scenes that I didn't much care for after I got finished with them.  Everything is progressing well.  Right now we are up to 125k words and I'm liking Jim's journey in this story.   The Final Battle is not up to snuff.  I wrote it and thought when I did, this isn't great but I can fix it.  I can't fix it.  It's just badly paced.  I'm going to have to pluck out huge chunks of it and turn it into something great.  The sad thing is that I think it would hold up normally, but I have 2 really good battle scenes in the book so far and it's only bad compared to them.   Another thing that's different is that I'm going for action all the time in this book.  Instead of a wordy beginning followed by compressing the action into a few dense chapters, Noob Town Plus is far more action-oriented throughout, plus I have about as much character dia...

 Noob Town Plus, the first draft is done.   It's a dry tale about Jim traveling the world to get back to Windfall.  I should probably add in a few jokes.  It currently sits at 115k words, but I'll add in several thousand words during the editing process as I wonder what Past Ryan was thinking (that man is crazy).   Wrote it in Scriverly, which was nice but I'm not sure I'm going to use it again.  It made organizing the book far easier, but I was used to writing it differently and I think that might have slightly changed the tone of the book.   My alpha readers like the plot progression and don't see any glaring problems with the book, so that's a plus. (Looking back at you Castle).  Overall, I think this one is going to be a winner, but its still a long way from done.  

Noob Game Plus So I'm running towards the ending of Noob Game Plus, book 5 of Noobtown.  It's a departure from the previous novels in that it's only MOSTLY first person, with some viewpoints of other characters.  I think I've kept the tone up for the book so hopefully, people like it.   I'm over 100k words, and I only had a word budget of 120k so I'm right where I want to be when I write the conclusion which will be about 15k words and a 5k epilogue.  So far the book hits all the points I want, but after I finish this draft I've got to go through it again to update it, which means my initial publication date is going down in flames already.   Hopefully by Christmas, but then again I'm always terrible with estimates.  

 How I write Every author has their own style, but I generally do add days and revision days.   Add day, I push the story forward.  I usually write by scene so I don't break up my mojo unless the scene is not working and then I stop so I don't commit a bunch of bad words to paper.  Once the words are on paper, they tend to stay there because you build on them so change becomes difficult.   On a revision day, I just go back through my story and reread it adding in all the good stuff.  Jim is terribly dry in my first draft.  Shart doesn't say much more than an occasional dum dum.  Badgelor says a whole lot of 'angry badger comment' until I sit down and actually go through the dialogue.   That's generally all there is to it to get the first draft done.  I typically add around 2k words a day when I have time to write, and average about 40k words a month so far for book 5. On days I can't do 2k words, I do 1k words.  On da...

Book 4 and Cliffhangers So I learned a lesson releasing Book 4, people do not like cliffhangers.  It was the finish of the first arc of Jim's story, so I figured I could get away with one.  I figured wrong.  Oh well, I'll just have to avoid them in the future.   Onward to book 5 and my oft-forgotten Blog.  I seriously need to update this thing more.  In any case, I'm busy charging through book 5, tentatively titled Noob Game Plus.  I had written myself into an overpowered corner of the universe with Jim's ability to take levels in any class.  As an exercise, I wrote a rough draft of the final battle and I was going full DBZ to make it work, which wasn't exactly what I wanted to do.   So I've fixed it with the 60 level cap.  That means that Jim's total level can't exceed 60.  If only there were ways to cheat or a demon who knew all the rules and how to break them.  The results have been very interesting so far with lot...