Hello everyone!
Having just self-published my third book, I recognize I need to not let go of the momentum I currently feel. What I recognized about myself from 2024 is that I am not as disciplined as I was when I was younger, something I hopefully can fix for this year. The only issue is that I need to relearn the routines I had before that helped me succeed in that goal. While I feel like my skills have grown and improved, I need to make sure the progress I make towards my goals is also improving. I’m hoping keeping a monthly update will help to not only keep me focused but also keep all of you updated on my progress. I can’t be taking four years to write another book after all.
Book 4 of The Legend of Nariko series & Science Fiction novel progress
While I don’t have a title for book 4 of The Legend of Nariko series quite yet, I have written three chapters so far. While that is good news, some brain storming later made me reconsider whether or not those three chapters are appropriate for the events after book 3, Shadows of a Dead World. In my current plan, the series is still a total of eight books and the way I have it planned out is that book 4 will lead into book 5 and help to set up the next arc of the series. I want to write this series with the intention that every two books would essentially be an arc within the entire series to help keep things fresh and interesting. That being said, I may need to revise the three chapters I’ve written.
But while I’m writing my fourth book, I’m also working on a new science fiction novel as well. It’s still very early in development and it’s a brand new genre for me to write, but I do find myself thinking about it a lot these days. I have it codenamed as Sierra’s Odyssey but I probably won’t go with that as the book title. I’m also trying to decide if this will be a one shot story or if I plan to actually make this a series as well. I am also debating if I want to try and run this series through a traditional publisher just to experience the traditional path of book publishing.
Comedic Silly Slice of Life Manga series
Something else I’m working on is a manga series that I had been thinking about for a while now. I wanted to do something a bit different than the serious and dramatic stories that I write and I had been watching a lot of anime last year. I watched a lot of funny slice of life series and came up with a silly idea for a manga series that I thought could be a fun idea to create. There’s a lot I need to learn and plan out to create such a series as it’s a completely new experience for me. I am still in the planning phase but I am hoping to start an outline at least this month.
Fun Fact: The Legend of Nariko actually started out as a comic series back when I was in High School but eventually became a novel instead.
Art Print Shop and Merch Store
Because I’ve also been improving my artistic skills to create better book covers, a thought that came to me was also looking into selling fan art and merch to help fund advertising for my book series. Book advertising is pretty expensive and if I can help subsidize that with fan art print and merch, that would help immensely. But this is something far out in the future as it requires building an art following and figure out the legalities of fan art, merch, etc. It would also be really cool to create merch and print of my own characters too!
Thanks for following and I hope this will be a great and productive year! 😊
– Raphael
Raph's Cozy Musings 