State of the Jaguar, Feb 2022 (Patreon)

Claiming this first week of February as an interstitial week, to re-evaluate my plans and catch up on administrivia.

The Kickstarter’s just about done. I’ve only got three physical prizes left to fulfill, and of those three, two are missing surveys so I can’t mail them anyway. I’m not seeing any major structural issues with the Alysha book, so next week I’ll do the edits on it and kick it out the door. Street date… let’s call it February 16th, to give retailers time to propagate the meta-data and link all the editions. That’ll wrap up the project and give me a second release in 2022. I also have a December release about 80% complete, the Peltedverse holiday collection—it just needs its anchoring novella finished, and then book cover/layout/marketing stuff.

So, three books in 2022, definite. That’s a good start. I just have to fill in the goopy middle of the year.

My re-evaluated plan, which should carry me to summer, is to write and Kickstart Coracle 2, and finish and publish Zafiil 1 and 2. I had been planning to use Kickstarter for something else, but a standalone middle grade fantasy series sounds like the perfect vehicle for attracting a handful of browsers off the Kickstarter site. Since Coracle hasn’t done well at retail, I don’t think I’ll be losing much momentum by giving away the second book to backers, and I might gain some if I have an unexpected ‘this goes viral’ event on the site.

This should leave me free going into autumn to work on Surela’s first book. If I swing Coracle and Zafiil in the front half of the year, that puts me at six books published in 2022, which is pretty good for existing fans. I really need to get to Surela so I have a “new reader” series to promote.

That is the plan for writing *for now*. We’ll see what happens.

From an art perspective, I’m all right with acknowledging that I am coasting until summer. My plan is to go back to regular streaming for the months I’m home, with the goal of creating non-book-locked art so I can feed the occasional buyers I’m getting from having shows at coffee shops. (When I say ‘book-locked’, I mean art that needs the writing for maximum enjoyment. My book cover paintings are book-locked in a way a random picture of, say, Reese in a fancy dress isn’t, even though that’s also of a book character). Also, I want to experiment more with the oil paints, because I really had fun with the last oil painting I did.

The scanning project’s going well, in the sense of ‘I’m doing it regularly’ (not in the ‘I feel like I’m making significant headway’ sense). It’s made it very clear that my existing way of organizing the art is… not good, something I realized when I tried to print out things for my February show and discovered that most of the finished work done after 2010 or so is not consolidated in a single folder where I can find it. I’m not sure how I’m going to fix this problem yet but it’s now on my radar, which it wasn’t before.

I’d also like to get some work done on the wiki, and here’s where I remind those of you with access to unpublished work *not* to add anything you’ve read in it to the wiki, even as a hint. I need to add that stuff myself, while making decisions about whether to change it or not. I can't emphasize enough how easily confused I am, so this is important. Otherwise, carry on. J

I think that’s what I’ve got on my plate for now, along with the usual boring administrivia (closing out the 2021 books, cloning spreadsheets and filling in 2022, scheduling promotions, etc).

Questions and comments, as always, are welcome!