What now?

The first draft of Aristeia Book 3: Tree of Liberty has been sent off to my beta readers. They’ll read it over and provide feedback. This will be followed by a round (or two) of edits. Then it’s off to the publisher for professional editing. That will entail a few rounds of edits.

But for the most part, the heavy lifting for the book is done. All of the editing will take time and effort but it will occur in smaller chunks. I’ll have lots of time, such as the next two weeks, where there literally is nothing I can do to further the books completion but wait. So I’m faced with the question, what now?

For the last year, whenever I would get to this stage with a book, I always had the next one in the series to get started on. And while I have plans for further series of books in the Aristeia universe, I don’t plan to begin on those right away. I’d like to try something different first.

Now, there’s lots of things I need to do to try and publicize Aristeia. It originally sold moderately well for an unknown author, but sales of late have been very slugglsh.   I’ve been neglecting the marketing side of things in order to spend what little work time the baby would give me on writing.

I could also work on short stories. There are several more to go for the Colonial War series and ideas for other random ones. I want to continue putting out one a month on the blog, just to keep myself writing if nothing else.

Then there’s the next book to consider. I have lots of ideas. My original intention was pirate/fantasy book in the vein of Wind Wizard. But it’s been a few months since I’ve given it any thought and there are a lot of other options. Fantasy would be a drastic departure from Aristeia. That both sounds fun and daunting.

In away I’m tempted to take a step back, wait for the baby to get a bit older before I tackle something completely new. When he’s two or three it would be worth sending him to a day care for a few hours every week so that he gets some experience socializing with other kids. That would give me real dedicated work time.

But that’s a year or two a way. If I stop writing full time how will it affect my writing? And can I justify not having a job when I’m not even pretending to be a writer? Sure, I can devote more time to marketing Aristeia but there’s only so much you can do without spending money. And yes, my primary job will be baby care. But even if my wife’s cool with it, I think I’ll go crazy not having a project that I can point to and say, look, I accomplished something! Marketing is necessary, but wouldn’t qualify because its so nebulous if your efforts actually pay off and even when they do, it’s often months later.

So what’s next?