Metatron released

via Amazon

For those of you who don't follow Scouring Monk (where I'm once again doing A-to-Z), you may have missed the string of posts I've done about the passing of my mother last week (the majority of them being various YouTube videos concerning songs important to her, presented without comment).  The reason I've released Metatron now is because this is the book I was working on when she was first diagnosed with cancer in the fall of 2010.  She was always my most eager reader.  Of all my tricky novels, this is by far the trickiest, insofar as it is basically straight biblical.  There have been a number of mainstream successes in this genre, and one of my favorites authors (David Maine) has written virtually all his books (none of which are necessarily religious, much like Metatron) in it, but I don't know, my confidence isn't what it once was in terms of my writing having a good shot at finding a significant audience (making this a somewhat IWSG post as well), so I shelved any notion of finding a publisher for it a few years back.  This is another shoddy self-release.

Metatron ("voice of god") concerns Adam and Eve, as well as their children Cain and Abel, their stumbling steps in and out of the Garden of Eden as they attempt to reconcile their relationship with God to the rest of humanity as it presents itself along various journeys.  This is well-trod territory, but I hope I've found a few new paths to travel.

Paperback and e-book versions, as always, available.

Okay, so the 18,000-words-in-a-day thing is not gonna happen...

I just wrote 12,000 words, the first section of my new WIP, The Pond War, what was supposed to be the grand unofficial NaNoWriMo project where I was gonna burn through the process quicker, relatively, than ever before.

But things change, and I'm happy with that.  I tried writing the beginning of Pond War a few weeks back, and it wasn't feeling right.  I stepped back.  I didn't mean to stand back this far, but it ended up being the right thing.  I found out what was supposed to happen in the story, everything I was wrong about.  These things happen.

I renamed another of my manuscripts during this process.  I've never renamed so many stories as all the manuscripts I've written over the last few years.  What I published as Pale Moonlight earlier this year had a few different names before that, and I was convinced each time I had nailed it.  Holy Men is now known as Metatron, a fundamental shift that also led to some changes within the manuscript itself.  I'm hardly impartial in such matters, but I think that's only made that one stronger.  Pond War is itself not even this WIP's original title.

I've even revised my end wordcount goal, downward.  I did some research and discovered 90,000 is wildly unreasonable for the age group I'm theoretically targeting.  It works.  Maybe I'm getting lazy, but I'd be happy with 50,000, which at least means that if I'm able to unofficially win NaNo again, I'll be done the first draft entirely by the end of the month.  I can be very happy with that.

We'll see.

(Edited to reflect more accurate word totals.)