I’ve been working on the final revisions of my current project, a short story collection called The Tales of Aquaria Lunis. There will be nine stories in this collection, but it’s just the first volume. When I started writing these short stories, I envisioned three collections of nine stories that are all in the same universe. I also want to write longer, novel-length stories in the same universe, but I haven’t started planning them yet.
Tales of Aquaria Lunis
One of the stories, The Sacred Maiden, is already available to read. The others still have to pass the eyes of an editor before I share them. I’m in the final stages with revisions and I’m super excited for others to read them.
Every story has its own characters and is set in a different part of the fantasy world of Aquaria Lunis. I wanted to write a little bit of history of all the important places that I want to feature in my novels. Some of them, like The Sacred Maiden, are folk tales. The tales that they would share with their people. Others are introductions to important characters in my books. I’m currently debating if I should do novellas of some of these characters instead of starting on the big story immediately.
Please let me know what you think after you’ve read them!
Struggles
I’ve been working on this collection for years and some of the stories were a real challenge to write. I had a general idea of what the story should be about, but I wasn’t getting that on paper. Maybe it’s because it’s the first time that I’m committing to these stories and see it through.
There’s one story that I’m currently struggling with. It’s the most important one, but also the one that needed a complete rewrite multiple times. Even now I think that rewriting it completely would be better than revising this version. But it’ll cost me weeks more to get this book out if I do. (That’s the beauty of self-publishing. I can set my own deadlines.) I’ll ask a few more readers what they think before I make a final decision.
Writing a book is hard. It’s not just putting words on paper. It’s translating your ideas into words. I see the scenes in my head and it was hard for me to describe them with words. It wasn’t a skill I had learned. And I’m still learning how to do that better. I know that what I’m writing now is better than what I wrote years ago and I’m proud of that progress. It also feels good knowing that I can still learn. My next book will already be better than this one. And the one after that will be better as well.
There’s no release date yet since I’m still learning how fast things are going. I’ve no idea how fast my editor will work or how much work 30k words is. There’s also no cover yet. I hope to release it in March, so keep your fingers crossed.
It’ll be my first book published and I’m already incredibly nervous. If you want to celebrate the release with me, do let me know by leaving a comment, sending a DM on Twitter or emailing me.
