Hello there everyone. It has been a whirlwind year, the likes of which we haven’t seen since 2014. And now, with the conclusion of our latest Kickstarter, we’re ready to jump all-in once again.
It’s time once again to let you know what’s on the docket. With so much planned out ahead of us, there’s no better time than now to tip our hands.
Legacy Novellas
I’m still at the point right now where I am very, very happy with what we managed to pull off regarding the Tales of Tellest books. From Mageborn to The Fall, every one of those books feels like good writing to me. The stories are compelling, and the prose is relatively tight compared to my earlier work. Sure, they’re shorter stories, but they taught me a lot, and they end when they are supposed to. Not every quest is going to involve a thousand people, and not every memory is going to involve traveling across the world. Somehow, we’ve still managed to tell what I believe are very compelling stories in the same world that will ultimately add to the overall universe.
One thing that we wanted to do to improve upon that quality included going back and tightening up some of the problem places we had. Tellest developed a style guide a few months back, and we’re busy putting together some finishing touches on those five novellas and the short stories. As such, we’d like to welcome Brandi Salazar to the team. She’s a delightful second pass editor who will snag some of the problems that Nace and I may have missed. Sometimes, when you’re a little too close to a project, you can miss things more readily.
As of right now, there are no plans to give the original trilogy the same treatment. We have a different game plan for that collection, but we’re not quite ready to divulge the information on that just yet. Just know that we are committed to bringing you the best stories we can.
Short Stories
Speaking of bringing you great stories, you’ll see that we’ve quieted down a little bit in the short story outlet in the previous few weeks. Preparing for the Kickstarter sapped my energy, and I aimed most of my creative output toward the bigger stories that you’ll see starting at the beginning of next year.
With that in mind, we’re happy to announce that we’re bringing Aaron Canton back for another set of three short stories that we’ll be preparing soon. We also have some other writers that we’re hoping we’ll be able to debut, and we’re contemplating opening up Tellest writing prompts again to see if we can find the next Aaron Canton!
New Novels
So, word counts can be a bit dubious in nature. NaNoWriMo considers a novel to be 50,000+ words, while the Nebula awards requires books to be 40,000+ words in order to qualify. In any case, we’re hoping that our new books coming out starting next year will mostly qualify as novels. With the exception of Dragonspeaker, each of these books should be longer than the books from our last wave.
Anyway, that was a bit of rambling preceding some awesome news. You see, even though we had the Kickstarter running, I’ve been on pace to knock out two of my books before their soft deadlines. If things keep going well, both Lord of Thunder and Transformed will be done by the end of October, in first draft form. They join the likes of Dragonspeaker which is already complete as a first draft, and Heart of the Forest, which is more than 70% complete. With that in mind, we’re well on track to keeping up with our new goal of releasing a book every 10 weeks starting in March of next year.
NaNoWriMo
Last year, I participated in my first ever NaNoWriMo event. I had to completely change the way I go about writing, but I learned a lot, stuck with my word goals, and managed to crank out my 50,000 words.
We’re going to be participating again this year, although it’s going to be a little bit off-rules, I’m sure. I’m aiming to make Silver Serpent Chronicles my “novel” this year, and it might not qualify in format or word count. We’ve been putting a lot of behind the scenes work into it though—much more than I typically do. I like to learn the story along with my characters. I’m a pantser more than a plotter, but I’m hoping that the outlining and preparing we’re doing for Silver Serpent Chronicles really makes it feel good when all is said and done.
It’s not official, but Rhianna is also planning on participating in NaNoWriMo—a mini-mo, if you will. Come November, we’ll see exactly how far we’ve come!
Card Game
By now, everyone should know that our big side project, that we’ve been unveiling piecemeal, is an upcoming card game. It’s influenced by Monopoly, D&D, Boss Monster and most of all, Tellest. We’re still a little ways off from drawing back the curtain entirely, but we’re getting closer than ever. We’re about 90% done preparing alpha art assets for the game, and then we’ll do a fair amount of internal testing before we introduce a beta team to join us. After that, we’re actively seeking space at conventions to debut our game to a whole slew of new fans.
If all goes well, we’ll be ready to crowdsource next October. Keep your eyes peeled for all the news we can hope to bring you regarding this cool new adventure in Tellest!
That’s it for now, but as always, we’ve got a ton of content just around the corner. We hope everyone has an awesome holiday season, and we’re so looking forward to bringing you some great new books starting in March of next year!
Michael DeAngelo
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I’m so glad that everything has been going well. I hope that you continue to be successful in your efforts. 🙂 I can’t wait to see what this game will be like.
We’re hoping to show it off in a bigger fashion real soon. As of last week, we probably have about 85% of the art assets done. Internal testing is going to begin right around the corner! Thank you for the kind words!
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