Man, I’ve almost caught up on these short story commitments I seemed to pile up over the summer. And it seems to be the running theme this year because most of my author buddies have had the same problem of over-commitment.

Does that make us suckers or gluttons for punishment?

Anyways, I managed to wrap up my fLUX Runners short story for “Onward Libertycon”.

To be invited to something like this is an honor in itself. I just hope my story lives up to the theme of Liberty. The proceeds of the anthology will be split between the LibertyCon charity of choice and two scholarships that are co-sponsored by Baen Books.

Now that I have that story out of the way, the next task at hand to knock out will be a follow-on to my story “Billy and the Kid”, included in Standing Fast, a Last brigade anthology.

The storyline follows Billy, a young “scrapper” who’s damned good at finding things in the wastelands after the great collapse.

Billy will get wrapped up in a dire situation helping the skeleton crew of Operation Overwatch to build their forces, but I’m not gonna let out any more than that yet. After this story, I plan to knock out a novel following this storyline into some major action for the area.

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Writing retreat

I don’t know how many other authors out there disappear on writing retreats, but I’ve found that it can help to jump-start a book, or at least help you knock out one hell of a chunk of planning or word count. Besides plotting out an entire series on one getaway, I’ve managed to put down over 20k and 30k words over the course of the retreat.

Now for this particular getaway, I’m meeting up with fellow Three Ravens owner and author R. J. Ladon. The primary intent is to get her away from as many of life’s distractions as possible. We were supposed to be working out the details of a new LitRPG series, but since she’s been cranking away on her first fantasy novel, I figured this would be the perfect time to jump into my own fantasy novel which I started over twenty years ago.

For those who don’t know, when I first started to get serious about writing, I was one of those paranoid authors, who mistakenly password protected the read and write options of his files while using a thumbprint scanner.

Yeah….

Don’t ever do that. Electronics break, and when life kicks into full gear, you might just happen to forget your passwords and get locked out of your files for.. say.. twenty years.

Luckily we were recently able to recover the files and access the story. I have just over 68,000 words of oh my god I want to claw my eyes out, but it’s a start, the meat of the story is there and ready for me to go in and polish.

As for location, I managed to find a nice little place that we’ve dubbed “The Grandmaw” house in Galatia Illinois, which is roughly halfway between me and her. Besides being the halfway mark, there is nothing around to distract us and there are lots of comfy spots to sit a spell and crank out word count. Which, I figure we’ll spend most of our time hanging out in the kitchen where there’s plenty of space and we can easily snack while we’re working.

So, time to get off here and finish packing before I hit the road.

I’ve dropped in a few pics of the writing retreat location below.

Till next time, keep your heads up and your pens sharp

~WJR~