I'm very excited to share with you that at some point around 3 am this morning I completed the rough draft of my next novel-length short story collection. My goal for 2025 was to write two books but I didn't exactly expect to finish the first one just a little over two months into the year! Maybe I should expand the goal to three books? We'll see, but for now I just want to enjoy being done with the rough draft of this one, lol. It turned out to be longer than expected, coming in at 85,000 words in length across six stories. This time the genre mix is horror/thriller, comedy, superhero/weird, slice of life, and two that I would say are action/comedy. It also features another tale about Quackers the duck, so anyone who enjoyed the wise cracking, psycho duck from my first book is going to find a lot more to love in the next book. This sequel tale is far more epic than the story in Quackers Goes Bananas as it follows Quackers and his friend Grover as they set up a Private Investigator practice in New York City. 

Finishing writing a book is a strange feeling. I've always found it to feel like finishing some epic hike or race. You're elated to be done, but also extremely exhausted. And weirdly, there's almost this sort of a letdown. This big, massive thing that was consuming so much of your time and thought is gone. I used to celebrate finishing writing a book by buying myself something, but I recently bought a new Kindle Paperwhite and that was the only real major thing I've been wanting. Although I did buy myself a celebratory pizza today and it was delicious!

So now we start looking ahead to all of the next steps of prepping a book for release. My dynamite test reading squad will be getting the final two stories soon, and I'll get to work doing edits. I should be seeing rough drafts of the cover soon, so the release process is definitely underway. Expect to see Creepazoids: And Other Short Tales release sometime in May! After that, my attention turns to my next endeavor, a Christmas themed short story collection! It's gonna be a fun year full of ridiculous stories!