Good afternoon, all!
It’s the Year of our Lord 2024 and I’m starting strong by sticking to my regular updates. Let’s hope I keep it up. The plan is still to release six books, five of which are finished as far as first drafts go.
I’ll go over the current plan before breaking things down more below.
Feb - Mutagenesis: Human Regression
Apr - Hollow Empire (THR4)
Jun - Minakai: Monster Tamer, V1
Aug - The Life Feast (THR5)
Oct - Minakai: Monster Tamer, V2
Dec - Thorn of the Blood Rose (THR6)
You’ll notice a slight change from my previous post. The intended August release has been replaced with a new entry in The Hollow Realms series, called The Life Feast, that was previously planned for December. December will now feature THR #6 instead of #5.
The main reason for this switch-up was because I was on Chapter 4 of The Life Feast for some time and had a wave of inspiration to power through a tricky scene to write. Two weeks later and the first draft of the novella was finished.
Anyway, the break down as promised.
Mutagenesis: Human Regression
The editing process continues and it’s actually making the book longer rather than shorter as there are spots I feel that needed a bit more detail in their descriptions, but otherwise everything is being kept more or less the same save for fixing typos, bad grammar, etc.
This is 100% confirmed for a February release as everything is good to go except for the above process. I’m very excited about this one because Mutagenesis: The New World is my book that’s dearest to me because it was the first. Human Regression is a very worthy sequel and that’s coming from me, my own worst critic.
The Hollow Realms
Rather than talk about each planned entry, I’ll talk about the series as a whole here.
Hollow Kingdom and Ashes of the Necropolis are continuing to get a trickling of sales, which makes me very happy considering they’re no longer my newest releases. Moonlit Soul on the other hand didn’t have the best launch, purely in terms of numbers.
That’s to be expected as a series goes on plus the Christmas expenses due to a later release than intended, but it does make me question the future of The Hollow Realms once I’ve tied up a long-lingering plot hint in a future book.
I have a long list of plans for almost two dozen books in the series, but if this year isn’t a good year for the series, I’ll see it through to maybe Book 7 or 8. The beauty of having the series be made up of mostly standalone titles means that I could end the series right now and each book is still a complete title.
I would like to try crowdfunding a larger standalone novel in the series with stretch goals to include an anthology of tales, but I’ll talk more about that post-Mutagenesis.
Minakai: Monster Tamer
I’ve been working on a few more chapters for Minakai Volume 4. The first physical release is due to be released in June. I was originally planning to crowdfund some art for it, but I may cover that myself. I’m torn on how to proceed with that, but either way I’d like some art and the book is getting released.
I’m also trying to get back into doing my own art, so I think I’ll start with a short Minakai webcomic. It’ll maybe take the form of 2-4 panel shorts rather than a serialised toon or anything, but we’ll see. I think the monster designs have the right balance of simplicity and intrigue that it will work well.
Conclusion
I initially feared that a book every two months would lead to a very crowded year, but I think it’ll be an interesting experiment. If we’re being technical, it’s four books of new material and simply physical/ebook versions of existing stories for the first two Minakai books. I have no intention of taking them down from Royal Road for the time being and I’ll keep releasing chapters on Patreon too.
It’s going to be an exciting year if you’re a fan of my work, so please be sure to spread the word and help me pull off this crazy move of six books for 2024.
Thanks all!