Dane Mallahan

Hello folks,

This is week number four of “What’s Dane Been Up To”.

This week’s main focus was on finishing up the short story I have been working on, New Life+.  And I am happy to say that it is finally up and posted!  For now it’s on Wattpad and I intend to put it on here once I can set aside a page for it.  I am not great at figuring out the website templates and how things are structured.  Here is a link to my Wattpad profile:

https://www.wattpad.com/user/writingwithdane

One aspect of this short story that I struggled with was not writing related, but rather coming up with a front cover for it.  I want people to read it, so I knew I had to come up with something other than a blank page to pull people in.  I am excited with what I was able to produce, even if it is a simple line drawing, and it did take me five or six hours to get how I wanted it.  In the future I will probably just pay someone to make a quick cover on the cheap, though I have my own issues with those websites.

I’m still plugging away at Book One of Path of the Chosen, and I’m about 1/4 of the way through a final edit before I send submissions to publishers.  I have done this before with the first book I wrote, but I of course did not get any responses.  I am learning to deal with that “failure” as just a cost of doing business.

Lastly I worked on issue two of Away Team, getting about 2/3 of the way through until an end.  I am really enjoying writing Away Team and I can’t wait to set up an audio book for myself so I can record it.  That might still be a month or so away, but I did make a nice new desk space for me in my office.  That also took up most of my Monday!

I’ve been feeling sort of down about writing and it’s taken me a few weeks to realize that it’s been all the other stuff I have been needing to develop, like the website, editing, cover art, etc, that is my issue.  All of that stuff is taking away from my creative time as a writer.  So instead of pressing harder on editing and polishing, I am going to set a time limit for myself each week/day so I can focus on writing 20+ pages a week.  I need to keep pressing forward creatively and I am hoping setting a limit on how much time I spend editing will help that.

Thanks again for reading this weekly update and I hope to have more pieces out in the near future.

Cheers,

Dane