TRN PUB #6 The L&J Journey & What's Next for BOOK 3?
A bit about the journey to Love and Justice (my Book 2) and...BOOK 3??? Also, how is it July already?!
Dear Reader,
Hello!
I wonder if I should start using ‘Dear Reader’ to begin writing The Raven’s Nest Pub newsletters from now on. Just to have something be consistent and different from the other posts I’ll be doing here.
I thought I’d end up posting a lot more after Love and Justice’s release, but I kept putting it off. There’s always that mental struggle of wanting to write and post on my Substack/Share a Newsletter and wondering whether I have anything worthwhile to say. I must have said it enough times in previous posts (or maybe on my Instagram?) that I tend to overthink things like captions and newsletters, mostly because I feel the pressure of perfectionism. It’s also hard to keep consistent and motivated as a small creative, but then again I won’t pick up the habit at all if I don’t keep getting back up. So, here we are.
Imperfectly posting.
A bit about the journey to Love and Justice
I can’t believe it’s July already and that a month and a few days have past since I published Love and Justice, Book 2 of the New Heroes Series!
I am over the moon with the fact that I actually pulled it off. I started the year anxious that I wouldn’t be able to, and now here it is.
You can even start reading Chapter 1 here:
It was also nice to finally have the physical copy in my hands, after all those years of struggling to get the story out.
My debut, Heart and Hero (Book 1) came out in 2021, so there's a wide gap between the first and the second. I’ve had the idea for the series and have been plotting and building it up since 2015 (possibly earlier), and it took me around 8 years to finish the manuscript that would eventually be Heart and Hero. I just didn’t expect that the second book would take a while as well.
Most of it I attributed to a personal life thing. At the time after Book 1, I had a day job that was draining. It took so much out of me that I could barely pick up the pen. I eventually fell into block after creative block, before I finally found my footing again. It took a while, and I even shared some of that journey when first making this Substack.
In truth, I kept having to push back Love and Justice. I hadn’t been happy with the old drafts, questioned the character arcs and motivations, and things weren’t falling neatly into place for the plot. It hurt me for a while as a creative that I couldn’t figure it out. I doubted myself and my art. I felt so left behind.
I made some big decisions about my personal life last year, and eventually faced the draft, made a neater outline, and made all the notes. Eventually, in doing, the story became clearer.
Still, when the year started, there was a bit of that doubt that I might end up ‘failing’ again. Like, what if I’d have to push it back again? It was easier to fall back into that negative self-talk after holding onto it for four years.
BUT.
There’s always a but, despite all the doubts. Even though I have a tendency for perfectionism and pessimism, a bad combo, really, I also have a stubborn hopefulness. Complexity is a curse to me, what can I say? There’s only so much one could do, so I just kept at it. I persevered.
SOMEHOW, sometime in March, everything clicked when I had this random idea about certain side characters. I might go into depth about this ‘magical march’, where everything actually fell into place for my story, in a future post in the New Heroes section. But it was one of those creative ‘Aha!’ moments that reminded me of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, which I read sometime in 2023.
Somehow showing up to do the work actually worked? You show up and the ‘muse’ reveals itself.
It’s quite a journey. :D
There’s a different flavor of challenges that happened AFTER I published Book 2, but that’s for another day.
For now, I managed some semblance of consistent social media content on my Instagram, posting about the series, the characters, and some art.
What’s Next for my Writing?
New Heroes Book 3
I’m just going to go ahead and say it —
I’ve already been working on Book 3. I have a title. My cover designer is working on the cover. The reveal will come this JULY.
I’ll be posting more about it soon once everything is sorted out.
New Heroes Spin-off projects
Part of my new mantra this half of the year is ‘Show Your Work’, all thanks to picking up Austin Kleon’s book again to motivate myself while I’m still growing an audience. Besides, there might be something in building an archive of my process that I (and hopefully future readers) could look back to someday.
I’ve been struck by ideas for stories about certain side-characters in the New Heroes series. Book 2 opened the gates of my previously blocked creativity and now I even have Moodboards for these ideas.
I will say this, I’ll share some code names for the projects I’m actively working on.
One is Project Rivals, the other is Project Chaos. Both of these are New Adult stories. Then there is Project Seer, still YA and more connected to the New Heroes Series.
I don’t yet know how long these books would be. Initially I intended some of them to be novellas, but I’ll have to see.
Notebook Pages #1: Moodboards
So, I like creating aesthetics and putting together visuals that project the vibe or themes of a thing I’m working on.
A Contemporary Romance??
I used to do webcomics and have long-since cancelled them, but recently certain characters ‘came back’ presenting shiny new ideas. You might see these ideas developed through art and sketches (my process) in a future post, before turning into a novel.