Hello Everyone!
March has been quite a month of development. I’m sure most have noticed that I haven’t posted any book reviews recently. I’ve mostly been focused on getting the worldbuilding established for the science fiction novel I’m working on, but I’ve also been working on the story for book 4 of The Legend of Nariko series and figuring out the tone and style I want for the manga. Because of this, I hadn’t had much time to do any reading this month. Bit of a flimsy excuse I admit, however I haven’t had as much energy as I had before. I am hoping to get back to book reviews soon and get things back on track.
That being said, however, this month I ended up writing more articles on my thoughts on certain writing concepts to varying results. Something I’ve noticed for some time now was that these posts tend to do better than the actual book reviews themselves. I still want to keep book reviews as a core part of the blog, but I do recognize that if I want to write two books and a manga series I won’t have as much time to read as much as I want to. It’s something I’ll need to consider going forward, but I will try to aim for at least one book review a month at the minimum.
The science fiction novel is taking some time to develop as it’s quite a different genre than what I’m used to writing. I want to try and keep this as science fiction focused as possible and not end up in a very science fiction fantasy style novel. There are aspects of science fiction that can feel very fantasy adjacent, but there’s a difference in how it’s set up in the worldbuilding. I want to make sure I have the setting properly established to write and flesh out the trilogy properly. I’ve got a lot of ideas and working through which ones are worth exploring and which are too unfeasible to really consider.
The manga I’m hoping to write is very different than what I normally write so it’s taking some time to wrap my head around. I am very used to writing very dramatic and intense stories with deep and emotional moments as that’s typically what I enjoy most. This story, however, is more comical and lighthearted than what I’m used to which might be a challenge but it’s something I want to try. I’ve already come up with a ridiculous title that fits the tone of the story and chapter 1 story is coming along rather nicely.
What I want to make sure I don’t lose focus on with all these things I’m trying to do is to make sure I publish book 4 of The Legend of Nariko. I started to recognize just how bad it was that I take around four years between each book when I was writing the character refreshers in book 3. There is so much that happens in each book that it’s rather unfair of me to think people would remember the details of each story when starting the next book of the series. My goal is to publish book 4 sometime next year. I recognize that is quite fast compared to my current schedule and rather ambitious. I’ve already decided to rewrite what I’ve already written as a better flowing plot for book 4 came to mind. That being said, I’m hoping to keep to this schedule.
That’s a rather quick update and I hope this year will be a very productive one!
– Raphael
Raph's Cozy Musings 