Friends,

Happy Labor Day to everyone! Hopefully you are in a place with family and friends, and hopefully life is treating you well.

Today marked the end of the first of three book giveaways that I am hosting on this website. The giveaways, which feature my debut book “Resistant,” are part of the lead-up promotion for my second book, “Unguarded,” which is due to release shortly after the New Year. You can follow my blog for details about it as I go through the writing process!

Progress of “Unguarded“

I am currently slowing down a tad in my writing of Book Two in the Faces of the War collection because I am playing around with a few different ideas in my head. In order to see what ideas pan out the best, I have to do a little legwork before I continue writing. I don’t want to waste my time (and yours) by producing writing that won’t fit well with the rest of the story.

In terms of word count, I recently exceeded the 21K mark, which puts me a few thousand words shy of halfway to my goal count of 49K. As I have said before, I am expanding the size of the second book as per the reviews of “Resistant” stating that a longer book would have been great. Though the story is what I want it and make it to be, I want to adjust things when and where I can to include my readers in my process and final product.

I am very excited about this story line, and I truly hope you will be too once it goes live in January. If things go really well, there may be a chance to release the book in December, but that may be pushing the envelope just a little. 

If you are a newer writer, that is something I stress to you: don’t push the envelope. Depending on your process, you may like to be under pressure or prefer to get things done with a little craziness along the way. But in a general sense, it is best to let things play out as naturally as possible so as to help produce something of a better quality.

What I mean by this is that, for example, it is best not to set strict guidelines or due dates in your process. This is because it will most likely force words onto the page that may not necessarily need to be there; likewise, it might take up too much room on the page, thus leaving out what could be important material. In my experience, if you don’t write as the words naturally come to you, then you leave yourself little option other than writing just to write. 

That is why I want to approach the material of “Unguarded” very carefully so I’m not rushing to get the words down, nor taking too much time and letting the material go stale. I will sort out my ideas this week, and hit the writing hard!

I am very grateful for your following, and I hope that I am reaching you with my writing in one way or another. Please tell a friend about my work. Word of mouth is a surprisingly powerful tool. I also encourage you to check out my Twitter and Facebook pages, as well as my Goodreads and Independent Author Network pages. Links to those sites are on this website, on the ABOUT page!

Until next time,

-Eli