I don’t like to set myself “deadlines” with my writing, mainly because I never, ever hit them.
The late great Douglas Adams famously said, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
Yeah, that sums up my relationship with deadlines, too.
After publishing A Wounded Heart in the first half of 2023, I had hoped that I’d get the next book in the series finished within eighteen months. But then at the start of 2024 things got awfully busy at work with staff changes and various other issues which left me essentially doing the job of two or three people and drained both physically and mentally at the end of each day.
Fortunately, the staffing situation got sorted out, and my workload is back to the kind of manageable level it really should have been for the past four or five years but never was. As a result, I’ve been able to refocus my non-working hours on making progress with the book that is now called A Healing Love.
Yes, there have been distractions—there always are—but I think I’ve made really good progress in the last six months. I now have a draft manuscript that’s in excess of one hundred and ten thousand words, making it my second longest manuscript to date, and a clear idea of what I need to do to bring this portion of Paul’s story to a satisfying end and move on to the fifth and final book in the series.
It’s been a long journey. It’s not over yet, but I can see the finish line. I had hoped to cross that finish line by the end of 2024, but that’s clearly not going to happen. But it was never a deadline, so it won’t make a noise as it rushes past.
In terms of a more concrete update this week, I’ve completed chapter twenty-five, which is another chapter in the “business” plot thread of Paul’s story, and I’m now moving on to a chapter I’ve really been looking forward to writing. Do you remember me saying I was trying to tell three different stories in this book? Well, this next chapter will advance one of those three stories.
The “hook” of this series—the “Big Mystery” if you like—is who Paul is married to in the prologues and epilogues that take place in the future. My hope is that by the end of this fourth book, the reader will have a good idea who that person is, will be happy with who they think it is, and will be looking forward to a final book that (finally) tells the story of their romance. Can I pull that off? I don’t know. I guess we’ll see.
On a different topic, I’ve been using a service called Fotor, which is an online AI photo editor and AI image generator to generate images based on passages from some of my books, including A Healing Love and I am planning to share some of those here. If you want to see some of them early, you can do that on my Fotor profile.
I’ve also used it to generate some images that I plan to use to make new covers for the Paul Roberston series of books. The service has a cool face swap feature, which I’ve used to make sure that the “model” in each of the images for the covers has the same face, which I’m really happy with. I’ll share drafts of those covers when I’ve prepared them.
