A Step Back and a Step Forward
So today starts with planning for a New Year, New You kind of thing.
The first piece of information is that I’m no longer with Portals Publishing. It is on an undetermined hiatus, and I’m okay with it. It was a life goal to be published with something as personal as Bully is, and I’m glad that I did that. After kind of being in limbo for a year, it finally has a closure, and I will be moving out on my own.
The good news is that in the new year I plan on getting out three books on my own probably through Amazon and iBooks if not Barnes and Noble. I plan on it being in physical copies as well as ebooks. It will be the finishing of this group of stories and, hopefully, it will launch some newer material as well.
The books will be “re-mastered” to be more like they were originally intended to be, but aside from a few plot changes and some “heavier,” more “adult” oriented notions thrown in, it will mostly be about restoring the books to their original format. Bully was never supposed to be the first book out, but it had, at the time, the most commercial accessibility, and thus I wanted to push that forward to give myself the best chance at publication. Now I know how to make sure all the work is so accessible and as immediate as Bully is - at least to me. It also means that I do not have to shoehorn in the characters from other books to help Bully make sense and make them available in future books. Bully in the Portals format is a very literary, very personal take on storytelling for me, and I’m proud of the work. Some find it triggering because of the abuse it describes, but for me it is a catharsis in many ways. In the original flow, Bully is the end of an epic cycle. If I could only publish the two Bully books as I submitted them to Portals, I would be fine with making that statement, but now it can also be read as a whole work and in place.
The books I intend to get out will still be under The Dance of All Beings Cycle. Book 1 will be Deemos the Troll. This book is about an important character of the multi-verse and an introduction to the events that set up what the whole cycle is about. It will also allow me to dive as deep into some of these characters as I did with Bully without shoving so much extra info into another book. The second book will be David the Hawk which will allow this character and his quest with Bhaltair the Templar Knight to make more sense with better motivation and better action. Dissecting the original book about David for Bully allowed me to see what the core of that story was as I removed half of what was there, and it gave me clearer focus as to what it should be. The third book will be Bully The Bear which will be the slightly re-edited contents of Bully the Bear and the 2nd unpublished book The White War Bear. This is how Bully was originally intended, and on my own, I can update and restore some of the situations to be a little more mature than was presented in the Portals text. Not to make it purposely offensive or sexual, but to add back some of the nuance that was lost in trimming it specifically for publication. The last book has yet to be decided. I have two different books that were supposed to fill that role, and I will decide which way I want to go now that I have a better editing eye.
I will also be pitching these books to bigger houses and if they get picked up, well, great! If not, that’s ok too. I am comfortable with upping the ‘maturity’ to make it even more Adult if that’s what is wanted, and I’m comfortable with trimming them down in places to make it more Teen or even Young Reader friendly. I liken it to the difference between the Watchmen theatrical and director’s cuts. It’s literally a few seconds of film that make the difference - not long passages of violence or gratuitous nudity. Though, as a thought, the theatrical cut of Watchmen would be better with about 30 seconds of specific nudity and violence cut…hmmm… If the concern was the length, though looking at some of the doorstops out there, I can’t believe length is an issue for some houses, there are natural separations in the stories where they could be split, though I’d hate to turn 3-4 books into 6-8.
This will be my writing for 2019. Hopefully at this time next year two if not all three books should be up. Even though Bully is the “3rd book,” I will release it alongside the first book so that people who want the ending to that story can get it before cycling back to the beginning.
OK.
Ever award and ever upward!