Ninjas!

I couldn’t resist an opportunity to post my typical Thursday blog on Leap year. So here it is.

I’ve been MIA for the month of February because I was going through some medical issues. I originally wasn’t going to post a blog either but I don’t want to miss out on having a blog post on leap year.

There is a bit of a time crunch as I wasn’t able to focus on my blog -at all- during this month and I still have a full time job to get to. Unfortunately, this means today’s article is going to be incredibly short.

NEWS

Sanctifiction: The Darkness at Home has been delayed by at least one to two months due to illness. Although I am almost fully recovered, I am horribly behind schedule and am trying to get caught up. I do have notes from my editor but I haven’t had the time to go through them and make the necessary changes.

Judging from my editor’s notes, the main issue is a lack of clarity once I have the character exploring the world I’ve created. There’s also issues with repetition and anemic language. Plan is to pump the prose up with some anabolic steroids to make it much meatier and visceral. Lot’s of work to do.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that I received brand new cover artwork for The Darkness at Home. Newsletter subscribers are going to get an exclusive first look at the disgusting retro themed book cover. Very happy with how it turned out even though most of you are going to think it’s gross, ha ha ha.

My unannounced projects also got delayed as a result but I am making strides on getting back into my writer flow. For homework I watched: Rosemary’s Baby, Phantasm, an episode of Black Mirror, and an episode of Evil. I’m watching the shows mainly to take notes and see if I can draw inspiration to improve my own story.

Surprisingly, watching episodes of Lincoln Lawyer gave me some ideas on how to handle my protagonist’s profession.

Sanctifiction release date, when?

Well, I hadn’t planned on the medical issues that hit me in both January and February, so I’m really behind schedule. However, I’m still going to try my best to complete the revised edit in March and hopefully have something ready to read in April. The problem is that as soon as I got better, my full-time job got more stressful which makes it even harder to focus on writing.

If I could write full-time, I’m confident I could finish the story in March. While juggling the job? Not so much.

Any progress on The Silver Ninja?

Although not much writing has been completed, I have been brainstorming a lot of ideas on what obstacles Cindy will encounter in her next adventure. I have an ambitious plan to take Cindy somewhere she’s never been while also trying to figure out how to deal with her sister. I have unintentionally created a dynamic duo that I don’t feel ready to write.

I wanted to have a few stories that were solo focused. Having Jadie introduced so early in the series with a suit of her own has made it difficult for me to come up with challenges knowing that Jadie can swoop in at the last minute for a rescue. In the Batman animated series, there were dozens of episodes before Robin ever gets introduced.

I may have to explore some drastic measures to reduce how powerful this team can be. In fact, one of the reasons I greatly struggled with the ending of Narco Hotel was because I didn’t know how to write the ending without Jadie’s interference. Her ownership of the Ruby Ninja makes it very difficult for me to put Cindy in danger. When you have two characters with identical power levels and those power levels are astronomically high against street thugs, it becomes impossible to come up with a challenge for them.

I will figure something out.

Next month goals

Knock out the revised version of The Darkness at Home.

Finalize the book cover artwork and have a cover reveal!

Thanks for reading!