My average work day is 10-12 hours long. I work in a lucrative sector, and I do enjoy my job, but the hours involved are cutting into my writing time. Add to this the fact I bought my first house recently – and unfortunately I am not where I hoped to be in Summer 2021 with regards “The Eight-Pointed Star” (“EPS”).
That is not to say no writing at all has occured – far from it. In fact, the current manuscript for EPS is coming up to the length of “The Blazing Sun” (“TBS”). However, I feel like EPS will be a much longer book. I want to add much more detail to the world, more depth to the characters, and introduce more perpectives. When I wrote TBS, I thought I needed to constrain it to around 125,000 words so it could be accessible. But I figure anyone who picks up EPS will be committed to more content.
I don’t know when the sequel will be done. I want to make EPS much longer, and spend a lot more time going over the new book’s first draft to polish it. I was also hoping to learn how to prepare better images for the cover. This requires a large investment of time, and I don’t have much of that to spare these days. At the moment I’m looking at the jobs market for a new opportunity in a more specialist sector. With my qualifications I’m hoping to find a role that still has decent pay, but with much more managable hours.
Phoebe Martin Allard 