At last, we’ve made it through all 50 days of January.

January is basically the first section of track on a roller coaster ride. It’s a slow, up-hill, slightly anxious climb preparing you to hurtle through the rest of the year’s highs, lows, and stomach-twisting loops at a speed that makes your eyes water.

Luckily for me, I actually love roller coasters, and as far as starts go, January hasn’t been a bad one. I’ve spent the month writing away with a fair amount of productivity. I’m still fighting the behemoth that is Part III of the 4-part sequel, but finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Currently working on revisions for chapter 17 (out of 24).

Some of the chapters I’ve been tangling with recently are definitely better, but will still need another pass or two to polish up. Yeah, I know. I can’t hear your sighing over my own internal screaming. As sanity-breaking and time consuming as it is to have to keep reworking, however, I’d rather do that than short you all on a quality story.

“Late is just for a little while. Suck is forever.”

Gabe Newell, founder of Valve and maker of a video game I admittedly haven’t played. Makes sense to me!

While I think Bloodlands was an overall easier writing experience for a number of reasons, I remember the middle chapters being especially difficult to pin down in that book too.

The plot in Nightlands… definitely feels a little clumpy in the middle still. I think the middle gets tricky because it’s a pivot point. The characters have solved some of the problems they started with only to find bigger problems on the other side and still have to contend with even bigger (often emotional) problems they’ve been carrying with them the whole book. But! Progress (and improvements) are being made.

I recently watched a series of indie author webinars, one of which was about doing more writing in less time. The presenter’s secret trick for accomplishing this feat was basically to set a 20-minute timer and… write.

Yes, it was pretty much that simple. A lot of people do timed writing exercises called word sprints, and I’ve also heard of this method as the “pomodoro technique,” where you work intensely for 25-minute intervals broken up by 5 minute breaks with a longer break after a few intervals.

I initially thought to myself that it seemed kind of silly. Surely I couldn’t just trick my brain into being productive and focused with something so simple as a timer. It was an easy enough experiment to run, though, so I tried it… and it worked.

*I know time isn’t really a man-made construct so much as our method of measuring it is. Come at me, science nerds. I mean that seriously. Time is a fascinating subject.

I’ve been using this 20-minute writing technique ever since for some pretty solid output while also leaving some time in the non-work hours of my day to do fun things.

Oh hey, it only took three months and two book updates before you actually got to hear about the book a little!

Most of the webinars I watched were actually focused primarily on marketing, which is an area in which I sorely need guidance. I’ve been slowly trying to ramp up my social media presence again, but definitely notice that I’m not getting a lot of engagement. This might be the Instagram/Facebook algorithms out to spite me. I have seen numerous other indie creators express how much they’re suffering under Meta’s “pay for access to your own followers” model. It might, however, also just be that I don’t know what I’m doing.

A lot of the marketing webinars I watched recommend newsletters as a standard communication method for authors and other creatives. I’ve never really bought into the idea because I feel that people are a lot more disengaged from email than they used to be.

That having been said, I can definitely see the upside of having a direct form of outreach to readers that I have relative control over without having to fork over extra cash to “boost” my posts. As it stands currently, I don’t think most of my followers on Instagram/Facebook are seeing a lot of my posts.

I’m not 100% bought into the idea yet, but just like the 20-minute writing exercises, I may fuck around and find about it. For science. Always open to thoughts and opinions on the subject as well.

That’s all I’ve got for book updates and book-related talk, but I do have one last little fun thing to share, because I am both a long-time Tekken fan and a total dork.

If you’re not familiar with Tekken, it’s a fighting game franchise that I’ve been playing since the 90s. They recently dropped their 8th (main line) installment, which has a neat character customization feature. I’ve seen people do some pretty interesting character recreations using the customization system and thought I’d try my hand at recreating some of our favorite murder-bus passengers from Bloodlands/Nightlands.

Just keep in mind that, as awesome as Tekken 8’s customization feature is, I’m still working with a limited range of hair styles, eye colors, clothing options, and body types, so these are far from exact portrayals and primarily just for fun.

I did try to make other characters, specially other Others (ha), but they’re particularly hard to recreate in this game with any authenticity. Alexander, for example, (Matthias’s Maker/crochety grandpa friend) is described as being skeletal in appearance, but as previously mentioned, the Tekken roster is pretty much all beef-cake.

Since this was pretty fun to do and I honestly can’t afford commissioning artwork for all of the characters, I’ll keep an eye out for other character creation systems that I can use, so stay tuned.

That’s all for January. Hope you had a great start to your year and you’re buckled up for the rest of the ride!