I wasn’t feeling too great about what I accomplished in 2016 until I took a look at what I actually did. Turns out I’ve been beating myself up for nothing, I actually got a decent amount of work done. There’s been a lot of upheaval in my life this year, what with a move across country, my current lack of a job, and the results of the election. This is why I do these posts. It’s easy to lose sight of what you’ve been working on when life happens.

So to recap, here was what I had planned for 2016:

• Polish Five Moons Rising for delivery
• Write a romantic short story for Bella
• Write a freebie short to be posted here
• Get Vortex of Crimson into shape for publication in October
• Start a big new project for the second half of the year

I managed to get all that done, and then some! Five Moons Rising was delivered on time, even a couple days early, if I remember correctly. It’s currently slated to come out in June 2017, which is a bit of a bump back from its original release date of April 2017. That actually works pretty well with what else I have going on, so I’m not going to fret too much about it. My big hope is it comes out in time for the GCLS con, so I can do readings and some marketing then.

I wrote the romantic short story written for Bella. It ended up being called “The Getaway,” after a few title changes, and was published in Bella’s Happily Ever After anthology.

Not only did I get that freebie short story written, but I actually ended up writing two! The first is called “Touched,” and stands on its own. It’s pretty damn hot, but I hope it also makes the reader think. The second is “Landing Day,” and it’s a novelette featuring Jak and Torrin in their first major holiday together after the events of Vortex of Crimson. I had a lot of fun writing it. It felt like writing fanfic for my own characters. It’s been a while since I wrote those two, and getting to revisit them was fun. It also allowed me to start setting things up for more stories in that universe down the road. Was that a giant tease? Why, yes! Yes, it was. Anyway, they’re both available in PDF as free downloads. I’d like to get them converted to other formats so they’re more easily read on ereaders, but that’s yet to come, I’m afraid.

Vortex of Crimson did come out in October, so that was good. Less good was that I didn’t do all the marketing with it that I’d been planning. The election threw a wrench into a lot of things I was working on, and my marketing efforts, such as they are, took a big hit. So my biggest disappointment this year is in my inability to market myself under adverse conditions. It’s hard for me under the best of circumstances, but November definitely wasn’t that. So if you haven’t picked it up yet because you didn’t know about it, it’s out now! It’s the third book in the On Deception’s Edge trilogy. I know there are people who won’t start a series unless it’s finished, and this one is definitively done. Jak and Torrin’s story has come to a close (except for the little epilogue which is “Landing Day”), so you don’t have to worry that I’ll never finish it.

Finally, I more than started a new project for the second half of the year! I pretty much finished it too. My newest project, and one I’m currently working to get into submittable shape is Demon in the Machine. If you read my previous post planning for 2016, I had a few ideas for what the second big project was going to be. And I did none of them. This one is all new! Demon is steampunk set mainly in Victorian London. It features an opposites-attract romantic subplot between Briar: a half-demon archivist, and Isabella:  a high-society cat-burgling debutante. Their attraction grows at the intersection of a plot involving demonic forces and technological intrigue. They have no idea how high the stakes are, or how they’re going to handle the forces arrayed against them and the ones pulling them together. It’s great fun. I had a blast writing it. It’s much lighter than my previous novels have been. After Five Moons Rising, I was ready for a change of pace. Not that I didn’t have fun with Five Moons, but the story there is much darker.

So that’s what I was up to last year. Check in again when I try to wrap my arms around what 2017 will look like.