Chapters 16 and 17 are “done”. 18, 19, 20 are half-ish. The rest are a paragraph, at most.
However, fighting with fonts made me wonder: When could I get this published?
My plan is to have the first and second ready-to-upload done before pressing the button on #1. The third will be written before the first is published, but perhaps not quite ready to upload.
When could this happen? Maybe Christmas? Maybe my birthday (February)?
There will be induced delay between the releases so that my apparent pace doesn’t drastically change.
If book one should, for whatever insane reason, have 100s of reviews and a decent number of stars after a month, book two is going out. More realistically, I expect book two to go about two months after one. Book three to follow two months after that. Book four should be at least close, if not push-button ready, two months after that.
My expectations are low, but not non-existent. I’ll learn _something_ about marketing between now and then. I will make a (more-or-less) valiant effort. If, when book four goes out, the first three have 3 one-star reviews each and I have no KU revenue, book five will be the end. I’ll wrap it up because I despise series that just stop and disappear into oblivion.
Spoiler Alert: The crash-to-a-stop ending is simple. The multiverse arrives at Earth, which is pitifully weak in comparison to civilizations that have been using the System for millions of years, finds resistance, laughs, and obliterates everyone. Maybe someone grabs a couple of werewolves for slaves so if the books becomes popular for some random reason in five years there will be a thread to pull on for a new series.
I’m assuming that books four and five will figure themselves out as I push through three.
Book One: You Asked For It is our intrepid heroes finding a path. Ends with first snowfall. I know this in advance because I am the weather god of that world.
Book Two: Foundations is pulling in others and consolidating the immediate area – and more importantly the populace – under our intrepid hero’s banner. Takes place over the first, hard winter.
Book Three: Untitled is two-fold: Put down any upstarts nearby and integrate with whatever is going on around them. I am a feeble god because I have no idea what that is, yet, but I can make it happen in the rain! “Integration” came to mind, but I want to save that one for more than the local area. “America” is possible, but I don’t want to deal with that much land mass. Perhaps a title for our intrepid hero: Duke. That’s nicely vague while sounding important.
Book Four: Untitled is book three scaling up. At this point, the people who matter are well aware that the entire universe has been System-ized. That’s not such a big deal because everyone else out there is new at this, too. The problem is the Multiverse, who know what they’re doing? There will be some hand-waving excuse why we haven’t already been conquered. This might be the time for our intrepid hero to travel.
Book Five: For Earth! That’s the ‘series dies here’ title. Doomed heroic battles that end up with Earth nuked from orbit – it’s the only way to be sure. Our intrepid werewolves are the last to fall, of course.
If all goes well, I’m thinking three trilogies. As I’ve mentioned, I get tired of a series around book 10.
Carefully done (stop laughing) the first three can be a trilogy. The triumphant finale of book three can be our intrepid hero’s pack becoming the first line of defense for Truth, Justice, and the American way. That’s mostly what it is, anyway, I just need to pump up the volume.
This is why I write all this out here. Ah hah! moment writing the below. It’s rewritten now, but if I hadn’t been writing this down, it wouldn’t have happened.
By dumping our big-fish-in-small-pond hero into the wider universe (not multiverse) in book 4, the trilogy pattern can repeat.
See where this is going?
Repeat the same pattern in books 7-9 with the multiverse (obviously some faction of it, not the whole thing).
I don’t see myself writing faster than three a year, which is four months between them (which means February release for #1, at best), which is double the initial release, but I don’t want to slow that down.
First trilogy (I probably won’t make ‘trilogy’ explicit anywhere) in 2027. Second in 2028. Third in 2029. I’ll be eligible for Social Security in 2029.
Remember, the end of Pack Rising is not the end of the already-known story. The Pack Wars and Pack Ascendent series are already lurking in my head.
Continuing the now fantasy-as-extrapolation: Writing full time, four a year seems low, but I will be older. Just to keep the math simple and the pattern going, let’s say those are also triple trilogies. That’s 18 more books. That’s four and a half more years. Pack Ascendent Book Nine would publish in late 2034.
Flipping back to the failure mode where it all ends in book five, I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m enjoying this, but am I enjoying it enough to press on in the face of failure? Our intrepid hero would, but that’s one of the things that makes him intrepid and keeps me sitting behind a desk.
This series would definitely be over. The entire Pack universe would go with it.
Another genre? LitRPG is fun, but also annoying (all the spreadsheets!). It’s also not my favorite genre to read. I like reading it because, much like Romance, there is so much of it. Unless something unexpectedly changes, Romance is out (gay or otherwise) because I don’t like writing sex scenes. It’s difficult (note how I avoided the word “hard”) enough to avoid using the word “said” a zillion times. Writing not boring-and-repetitive sex scenes is nearly impossible.
It looks as if I have at least two years before it becomes an issue. My current problems are sufficient unto the day.
Marked Up 