Fire and Fools update

Mother of God. I’ve been revising Fire and Fools like there’s no tomorrow. I’d dug it out of my old college drive, thinking it just needed a few tweaks. Nope.

Instead of playing Cyberpunk 2077 for the third time after my daughter goes to bed, I’ve been buried in the manuscript — refining prose, tightening punchlines, and sharpening dialogue to better match the characters as I see them now. And every time I think I’m finally done, something else pops up. But the good news is, those somethings are getting smaller. So glad the public Beta Read on ScribbleHub gave me a chance to sharpen things.

It’s starting to feel like I’ve got a tight, 60k-word fantasy comedy on my hands. Let’s talk about what happens after the book drops (shooting for August, I think). Fire and Fools is a standalone story with sequel potential—if it sells well enough, I can absolutely take it in that direction. But if not, no worries. That’s the way of the KDP author.

In the meantime, I’ve got a few horizontal prequels in mind to expand the world. I’ve already written about 7k words on one of them, so we’ll see which way I lean once I put on the marketing hat and see how things shake out.

The next Sherlock Holmes pastiche novella is done—at least the first draft. It just needs some polishing now. It’s a collection of three short mystery stories, all tied together. Pretty happy with how it’s shaping up so far. We’ll see if I still feel that way when I get into editing.