I’m counting down. Only eight days until the release of Moon Dragons, the first story in The Cities of Luna coming out from Distinguished Press! I’m both excited and terrified. Excited because it’s a story I love and am proud of. Terrified because…what if no one reads it?

Others stories will release with every full moon. That is December 6, January 4, February 3, March 5, April 4, and so on. My hope is that my audience will find me, and continue to look forward to each new release.

Now, about those writing goals…

I am doing well regarding the general goals of either writing or writing-related stuff every day. Actually, this takes up a good chunk of my energy every day. However, the goal of ‘finish a short story within a few days of starting it’ fell flat on its face this week.

I made that goal because I noticed that, if I do NOT finish a short within a few days, I lose where I was going and either I don’t finish at all or the story takes an odd turn. It ‘goes wonky.’ My best example is Pastor Pastornack’s Sabbatical. I put it down when I was about halfway through, and when I went back it grew wonky legs and decided it wanted to wander off and be a novella.

It doesn’t deserve to be a novella.

That side tangent, though? The wonky one? Will make an excellent story in itself later on, either for this character or another one. I’m beating Pastor Pastornack into submission, refocusing and keeping the story between 5k and 10k words.

NaNoWriMo starts on Saturday. I’m hoping to finish Revision 01 of both Pastor Pastornack’s Sabbatical and Between the Moon and New York City. Then I need to work on the outline for Night on Bald Mountain, which is the fifth book in my Steampunk (or Steamypunk) series Victoria Pontifex.

I’ve started a Thunderclap to tell all NaNoWriMo writers

“On your marks…get set…WRITE! Go go NaNo-ers! Good luck, and may the wordcount be always in your favor. #NaNoWriMo”

We only have a few days to make it work. To join in, all you need to do is click on the Thunderclap link, then choose Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr to contribute. I explain what a thunderclap is here in this blog post. In short, it’s a way of coordinating social media promotion. Every participant donates a tweet or status update to the project. As long as we get 100 people to join in, then the message will go out at noon (Eastern US time) on Saturday. I chose that time because it is late afternoon in the UK and morning on the West Coast. That should make it so a lot of people get to see the message. Please join us!