Weekly Update: 6/21

Good morning, Arizona!!!

Or possibly good afternoon, depending on when you're reading this.

Or possibly somewhere else in the world, on the fairly substantial chance that you're not located in Arizona.

Anyhow...

It's been a few weeks since I've been able to put out a weekly update, and I apologize for that. In this update, I'll go through why that is, and what I've been and will be working on!

Online content released:

- TEQ Volume 3: Creatures of Darkness: Ash (Chapter 33)

Behind the Scenes:
- Long story short, the last few weeks have been wild. At my day job, two people in my department gave 24 hours' notice and resigned, leaving us extremely short staffed. Oh, and then a third person had to leave for a short time, leaving us even more shorthanded. Long story short, my work has been EXTRAORDINARILY stressful, which has made it almost impossible to focus on writing. Like I've said in past posts, having a larger workload at my day job doesn't limit the TIME I have to write, but when I go home knowing that I missed multiple deadlines and have an impossible workload to take care of the next day, it makes it hard to relax enough to allow the words to come once I do sit down.
Oh, and then I went on vacation. The last week, I've been down in Arizona!!! Which has been absolutely MINDBLOWING... I've seen pictures of the Grand Canyon, but pictures simply don't do it justice. Suffice it to say that basically everything about the state has left me in awe. Cactus that grow as tall as trees, yards that are landscaped with colored gravel instead of grass... Just WOW.
Anyhow, all of this has had a fairly negative impact on my actual writing productivity. I've spent most of my free time working on editing Apocolyps Squad II, which has thankfully been progressing quite well! If you liked the first book, you're going to LOVE the second one!!! It expands the lore of the world quite a lot, and really pushes the characters to their limits. 

Plans for next week:

- TEQ Volume 3: Creatures of Darkness: Realmship (Chapter 34)

Behind the Scenes
- Yeah, I don't really know for sure on this one. I won't get back from Arizona until Sunday afternoon, at which point I'll be spending a great deal of time unpacking and getting the house back together. As far as I know, none of the vacancies at my work have been filled yet, so my productivity next week will probably be on par with last week. My goal is to finish with Apocolyps Squad II by the end of next week, and ship it off to my editors by the end of the month. Once that's done, I'll probably switch back to TEQ. I'll start working more on the appendices for Volume 3, and then possibly start on Volume 4.

Until next time!

Dakota

P.S.: On a brief side note, I really want to use a lot of the settings that I've viewed down here in Arizona as part of my books. Right now, I think that I'll be adapting part of the Vamsick Desert (check here if confused), which will appear in future volumes of TEQ (probably around volume 6).