Final Match (Book 7 of Escape from the Abyss series)

My wife and I are doing the Read-Out-Loud part of the book editing for Final Match. We are 60% done. That’s right; we read 60% of the book (technically, 66%, or 71k of 107k words). So, 1/3 of the book is done, and I’m extremely confident we’ll finish the 1/3 remaining tomorrow. I have a bunch of tiny, inconsistent changes I need to fix, but I can do that in no time. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I don’t need to rewrite something to fit some problem in Act III (that almost never happens, but it does). So, if things go well tomorrow, I’ll have time to fix any issues by tomorrow night and publish by the end of the day. If something looks really bad, I’ll publish it later in the week (that would be the worst-case scenario). Obviously, I’m going to make my stated deadline in early October for publishing the book.

What’s next?

So, I have a Daphne book that I’m hacking on. I’ve been spending my extra time at around 8 pm or later to put down some words for RUSTY’s Memories. Oh yeah. This is going to be the best Daphne book ever. Of course, I’m showing off my new skills. I’m only 5,500 words into the book, but I’m really liking the way this book is progressing. This book will include Roberta. She’s one of those colorful characters from the book Dangerous Cargo. The book has a 5-star rating, but it only has three ratings and no comments. So, let’s be real, it hasn’t had that many reads yet. It has 58 Kindle purchases and 2,414 KU pages read (which is about the same as 15 books). If you haven’t read Dangerous Cargo yet, and you have Kindle Unlimited, please go out and read it and post a review. Good, bad, whatever? I know this book was written before I had a lot of experience (it was written in June of 2022). Once I get RUSTY’s Memories published, I want to see the difference in ratings to gauge how much I’ve improved in my writing. It’ll be fun. And, if you’re a KU reader, well, you only have wasted your time, assuming you don’t like the books (believe me, I’m a KU reader, and I’ve read a lot of stuff I don’t care for).

What Else?

My next major project is to write some cozy mysteries. I currently have a series idea for a cozy that involves a tech geek who builds a robot dog. Except, he’s the only one in the series who knows that the dog is a robot (yeah, it’s that realistic). That will be the overarching theme of the series. He has to keep the fact that his dog is a robot a secret. But it goes deeper than that. Oh yeah. Because, why would a 20-something guy want to create a robot dog but to attract the attention of some hot girl he wants to get with? Yeah, I want to include a bunch of other interesting characters in this series. I’ve somewhat “gamed” who they are and how they’ll fit into the stories. But I still have a lot of research work to do on this series. Like, I need a pen name (which I’ll announce here, in case there is an overlap between sci-fi readers and sci-fi/cozy readers). I need a series title and then titles for the books that will be in the series. All of this must happen right around the time I come up with a plot for the first book.

Ah, this is going to be fun…