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For those who somehow managed to miss all my blog posts from the last week, I now have a finished first draft of Mother of Souls and am starting to strategize revisions. Usually I use my weekly Alpennia post to expand on some topic that came up while writing the previous chapter, but at this point I wouldn't know what to choose. So let's do a year-in-review thing instead.

In 2015, I made about 75 posts with the "Alpennia" tag.

I started the year off by making "Three Nights at the Opera" available as a free e-story. I have a number of other short pieces percolating that I hope to use similarly, i.e., start by using them as a special promotional item and then eventually put them up for general download. It would be nice to have one to be using currently for this purpose, but the stories I currently have kicking around come later in the overall timeline and would be spoilery. Some of them show events that didn't really fit well in any of the novels. Some of them are backstory or more in the way of character sketches. I expect that some of them will be exploring points of view of people who--for one reason or another--would never be protagonists in the novels.

For example, the next one I'm likely to write focuses on Celeste, the dressmaker's daughter, who gets a few brief mentions in Mother of Souls and will be a major secondary character in Floodtide. After Floodtide comes out, I have a story involving Jeanne and Antuniet that comes right around the end of that book but mostly involves Jeanne recounting the tragedy of her first love. At some point after the events that set it up have shown up in the novels, I have at least one story I want to write about Anna Monterrez, the alchemy apprentice, and aspects of her life that the novel protagonists don't have access to.

The next thing I did during 2015 was lead up to the publication of The Mystic Marriage with weekly teaser-snippets from each chapter in turn. This was a lot harder than you might think: to find a short excerpt that is both interesting to read on its own and avoids directly spoiling any important aspect of the story.

During that period, I also tried my hand at getting some advance reviews and publicity lined up for the book. This, too, was harder than you might think and--with two exceptions--mostly failed. Not having ARCs (advance reading/review copies), even in e-book format, is a pretty major handicap when you're trying to get publicity. I had a personal invitation to send an advance e-book copy to Publishers Weekly for review, but the editorial schedule at my publisher is so tight that, by the deadline for PW, the only version available was the one I'd turned in. So I got my review, but one wonders if it might have been more positive if they'd had a later version.

I did get a release-day review from Liz Bourke at Tor.com, which was my greatest success. Heck, pretty much my only review success for that book at dedicated review sites (as opposed to personal blogs). My other efforts to get advance copies or even publicity information to relevant SFF sites were met with blank walls. From where I stand, it's impossible to know how I failed with any particular venue, whether it was a lack of personal contacts, prejudice against my publisher, an assumption that I must be self-published since I was doing my own publicity, mistaken assumptions about the nature of the book, or something else entirely. I'll be trying again with Mother of Souls, because I can't not try. And I got a bit more general buzz in 2015, especially from the lovely fan community at the File 770 blog, which I've been enjoying participating in.

I was seriously disappointed at the reception that The Mystic Marriage received in the lesbian fiction community. While Daughter of Mystery was reviewed on the websites for Curve Magazine and Lambda Literary, as well as blog sites like C-Spot Reviews, The Lesbrary (twice!), The Lesbian Reading Room, and The Lesbian Review, there have been no similar reviews to date for the second book (although The Lesbian Review says they'll be covering it soon). All I can do is make sure people know review copies are available, I can't make them want to read it. I did a couple of guest-blog spots about the book to no real effect.

Well, that started going to a bad place. Moving on…

I'd spent the earlier part of 2015 working on several short fiction pieces, one of which is now out ("Where My Heart Goes" in the historical romance anthology Through the Hourglass), one of which has been collecting rejection slips ("All is Silence", a queer Arthurian adventure), and one of which I've decided to make the anchor of my first serious self-publishing venture ("Hidebound", the final story in the Skinsinger series, which I plan to put out as a collection in 2016). Another story I'd sold in the later part of 2014 came out: "Hoywverch", the first in my queer Mabinogi quartet, at Podcastle.org. And with The Mystic Marriage finally released to the world, I started serious work on Mother of Souls in May. I'd drafted up a bunch of scenes, particularly in the first few chapters, but that was when I sat down to tackle it in systematic fashion. At the beginning of August, I felt confident enough to project how long it would take to finish the first draft, added in time for several rounds of revision, and sent the proposal to my publisher with a delivery date of the end of June 2016. I'm now technically ahead of schedule.

The rest of the year was spent blogging about writing-process topics as they came up in the work. I really love talking about process--I can talk people's ears off about it. And talking process helps prevent me from burbling too much about the specifics of the story. I don't know if I'll do the "chapter snippets" thing again as a count-down for Mother of Souls. Opinions?

So what's up for 2016 in terms of writing projects? Obviously, revisions and delivery of Mother of Souls. Also, getting started on the next book Floodtide. This will be a structural departure from the first three novels: YA, first-person, single viewpoint, focus on working-class characters. It also heavily overlaps the time-frame of Mother of Souls, so it will be fun doing the little story-intersections. But Floodtide is meant to be a complete stand-alone, which will be another challenge. (Not that it wouldn't work perfectly well to read it as a sequel to the first three, but the idea is that it can be an entry point to Alpennia without any prior experience.) It should be significantly shorter than the first three books as well, so I have high hopes that I'll finally manage to hit a "one book a year" cycle by having a completed first draft by the end of 2016.

My other goal for 2016 is to revise the entire Skinsinger series and self-publish the collection (probably only in e-format, though I may look into some sort of POD for hard copies, because there are times when you want a hard copy). The fact that the material all exists already (though the revisions to the earlier stories may be significant), and that I'll be self-publishing, means that I can probably aim for release somewhere in mid year. It makes sense to have Worldcon as a target, just because. The majority of the emotional work for this project will be lining up the supporting contributions (cover art, editing, book design) as well as negotiating the process of getting the e-book into all the various distribution venues.

And that's the year that was in writing.