Eston in 2024

Like I do every year, I'd like to take a moment and look back at the past year. Since this will be a longer post, feel free to use the list below to jump directly to the sections of interest.

• 2024 Overview
  • About Writing
• 2024 in Numbers
• Updates on Projects
  • The Lost Tyronian Archives
  • The Baneseeker Chronicles
  • The System of Garadia and a Deficiency Sequel
• Goals for 2025

2024 Overview

2024 was a great year, in many ways. At home, things have started to settle down a bit, in a good way. In 2023, I struggled with exhaustion, both physically and mentally. 2024 saw a significant improvement, and although it remains an interesting juggling act to balance children, family, marriage, work, writing, and everything else, it felt a bit easier to manage in 2024. Things are not quite where I'd like them to be, but I've come to realize that I need to adjust my expectations now that I'm a bit older and have four young children. Although sometimes difficult, I'm finding the journey of creating a new reality that works for me (and hopefully my wife and family) an enjoyable one.

About Writing

On the writing front, it was a good year. I set to write more consistently, and as you'll see with the numbers below, I've improved since 2023. Things slowed down quite significantly during the four last month of the year. I only wrote 5 days in October, and 7 in September and December. Some of this had to do with an accumulation of writing fatigue, added to all the effort I put into the Kickstarter Campaign for 'Surrender'. By writing fatigue, I mean a state where my mind becomes overwhelmed with the stories and where I can't easily see the complete picture of what is happening or going to happen. It doesn't make writing impossible, but it definitely make it more challenging, and demanding. It is a feeling I often experience when completing a story, after spending one, two or three months of intense writing. In 2024, I wrote a lot between January and August, and I probably didn't pace myself right. The result was that I needed a break, which I took between September and December.

As for the stories themselves, I spent most of the year working on book 1 ('Surrender') and 2 of The Baneseeker Chronicles, as well as a short story ('The Huntress' for the anthology 'Summer Paths',, which is also linked to the Baneseeker Chronicles).

2024 in Numbers

Updates on Projects

Here is a short update on my current projects. To get regular updates throughout the year, I invite you to subscribe to my newsletter: The Red Dragon Insider.

The Baneseeker Chronicles

Surprise!

The title of the second book of the Baneseeker Chronicles is: 'Defeat'.

Keep an eye for the cover reveal later in 2025, and a launch by early fall 2025.

In 2024, I made significant progress on the series. You probably saw that book 1, 'Surrender', was launched successfully in a Kickstarter Campaign. You can expect the other books in the series to be launched in a similar fashion. Remember that Kickstarter is different than say, GoFundMe, in that it is about supporting a project and receiving a product; put another way, it is a way for you to get a book earlier, with possibly a few extras.

At the time of this writing, I'm done polishing Defeat based on my alpha and beta readers, and will be sending it shortly to my editor. Book 3 has a completed draft, but I'll be working on it much more in the next few months with hopefully a launch early 2026. I also already have many ideas for the events taking place in book 4, the big conclusion to the first four books, providing answers to many of the questions brought up in 'Surrender'.

Also, I created a live post for these books, which you can access here: The Baneseeker Project. This post is updated regularly with my progress on the project. Alternatively, if you are subscribed to my newsletter, The Red Dragon Insider, I'll be sharing all the updates there as well.

The Lost Tyronian Archives

Although I'm mainly concentrating on the Baneseeker Chronicles at the moment, the following stories are available in The Lost Tyronian Archives:

• The Stranger of Ul Darak
• The Burden of the Protector (Prequel/Companion to Stranger)
• Erasing (short story taking place 10 years prior to Stranger)
• Ridge (short story to be published in 'Earth: An Anthology' later in 2025, taking place at about the same time as Stranger)

In the next year, I'll continue to plot book #2, which I would love to publish in 2027.

The System of Garadia and a Deficiency Sequel

I have no plan on writing any story in Garadia, but there is still a lot available. I know that many of you would like a sequel to Deficiency, and if I'm happy to say that it is in the works! Still, it will most likely be a few years before I get to it. For now, here are the current available stories:

• Deficiency
• A Dream (short story taking place after Deficiency)
• A Friend (short story about a girl and a friend)
• Logbox (short story about a prisoner on an asteroid)
• Red Stars (short story about Eltaya, taking place 6 years before Deficiency)

Goals for 2025

I always have too many goals, objectives and projects, so it's not always easy to decide which one to focus on. For 2025, my main goal is to improve my writing speed. Put another way, I want to be smarter with the time I have and write faster. To this end, I started plotting more, so that when I sit to write, I have a better idea what to write. I used to be a panster, meaning that I would discover the story with the characters, as I was writing it. This is a lot of fun, but also means that I needed more revisions. Some people are plotters, and they plan almost every scene. In my case, I'm more in the middle, using a bit of plotting to guide my story, while still discovering big chunks of the story as I write it. I also updated my tracking sheet, because it impossible to adjust my approach if I don't know what I'm doing, what is working, and what isn't. It is now May, and I can say that I've been quite diligent in updating the tracker. It's already provided me some insights. For example, I used to not write when I felt tired, thinking that I would be less efficient. It turns out that being tired doesn't impact my writing as much as I thought it did.

On the stories side, I'll continue to concentrate on The Baneseeker Chronicles in 2025, in the hope of bringing the four first books closer to their conclusion. I'm planning on launching the second book late summer or early fall, using Kickstarter once again. It really helped me a lot to run a campaign for 'Surrender' and sell some books at launch time. If you plan on purchasing any of my upcoming books, doing so through the Kickstarter campaign is one of the best ways to support me, and get your copy earlier (before the official release date on sellers like Amazon). With each campaign, I'm hoping to continue learning so that I can be more efficient in running the campaign, but also so I can offer more extras with each book.

Final Word

One thing I can say is that my love for writing continues to grow with each word I put down and with each book I publish. For me, it's more than simply creating a story. It is about discovery, about adventure, and about sharing all of it with readers.

I'm ending this post like the previous ones in this series: with a few quotes.

"I write to discover what I know."
— Flannery O’Connor

"Writing is its own reward."
— Henry Miller

"The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe."
— David Hare

Keywords:  Life , Writing