Several author moments
1) Attended an author festival, met with several indie publishers, traded notes with several published authors. Picked up useful data on self-marketing, etc.
2) Went to a seminar hosted by the Northwest Writers and Publishers Association on e-publishing and leveraging social media tools. Tricks and tips of handling the various channels a writer has access to these days. Got a chance to pitch my book, was happy at the response (I seem to be hitting a niche in story content without much competition currently - and not because it isn't liked, just no one seems to have thought of it.)

About halfway through volume 3 rough drafting ... I'm rollercoasting a little bit. Very funny and very dark ... but I feel like that's really how it goes sometimes.  I did pull back and separate out a few events because it was turning into a perfect storm of oblivion and doom.

Part of me wishes I could put some of this earlier in the storyline but it just doesn't fit there. The feedback I've gotten on volume 1 is really good but the problems will require some careful tweaking. Probably the biggest epiphany is that I had written the story too much from an Eastern literature perspective for the average Western reader. Readers familiar with anime and manga were having no problems whereas non-anime types were "Oh my god, this is drowning in pathos and why are these people so needy?" I was taking tropes of the culture and playing around with them - satire, inversion, subversion, etc. but I forgot to tune it for Western sensibility. I think I can balance it out, but yeah, some dialog changes at the least.

I don't want to drive people away before they finish the first volume. The second volume seems to be really cool to most people so I want them to get there ;)

The third volume rough draft is very cool as well but I think it needs more upbeat moments to balance some seriously downer events and epiphanies. Things to do.

And ... I'm still no where on illustrations. I feel really strongly I need at least internal illustrations, more than just book jacket pics. Looking at DAZ still but that's a black hole of nickel and diming if one isn't careful.

Lots to do this month and it is already half over. Yipes.