Time for an update, I guess. I’m working on Ephialtes Part II, and making good progress. I’ve been trying to beat the manuscript into something readable for the last few months and it’s finally beginning to take shape. Early drafts are so full of typos, structural problems and placeholders that it’s difficult to appreciate what might be lurking beneath it all. There is no flow whatsoever when you read through them as you’re constantly stopping to make minor (sometimes major) corrections, jot down notes, search your internal consistency checker and do a thousand and one other necessary things.
There’s still a way to go yet but it feels like I can see an end in sight. It’s been bent into shape enough and polished to a degree that I can now appreciate what it is that I have written, and I think it’s not too bad. There’s a few more things left to straighten out and some more very fine polishing to do but, essentially, I think we’re at the home straight. I should have something for the beta readers within a couple of months.
Downloads for Ephialtes remain good. Since it went permafree in the spring we’ve had over ten thousand downloads, hopefully clocking over to eleven thousand early in the New Year. Sales of the Ephialtes Shorts haven’t been as robust, but they will be anthologised next year and as such should be easier to promote.
Ephialtes Short IV: Be All You Can Be (one of my personal favourites) will be released on 21 February 2017. The longest of the shorts (I’m pretty sure that, technically, it’s a novella), I hope it manages to find an audience. I came to like the main character so much she got to have a significant role in Part II and will, in all likelihood, be a major player in Part III.
The other thing I’m kicking around just now is the story for Part III. I have two or three pages of notes and I know what the story is in broad terms but I’ll need to work on it and refine the structure in the coming months, especially since it looks like I’ll be in a position to begin writing the first draft by springtime.
That’s where I’m at, then. There should be a couple of big releases in 2017 (The Ephialtes Shorts Collection and Ephialtes Part II) and I hope to have at least a draft of Part III in the can before the year is out.
Best wishes to all of you.
Gavin E Parker, 31 December 2016.