How time slides by when you suddenly end up with several more things to do than you’d banked on.

As always this is down to several things, a stinker of cough and cold, which is still lingering on even now, causing me to fall behind with a couple of things, closely followed by the artist who had offered to create my cover art for me having to pull out due to other work commitments.

Now, my not so fiendishly clever master plan for the next 12 – 15 months has been deceptively simple. Write lots, approx 4 new novels, including books two and three of my Flames of Time series, and books one and two of my Glass Darkly series, the latter i’ll be releasing in the serialised format I’ve mentioned in previous posts.

This in turn would equate to me publishing either a new novel, a serial episode or compiled serialised novel every other month through 2015.

So far, so good. My first novel has been ready to go for over six months while I wait for the artist to do the cover, in the meantime I’ve finished the first two episodes of my Glass Darkly story, and a good chunk of episode three.

But, now that my artist has pulled out I’ve had to launch a design contest through 99Designs to find a new cover artist, and while quick and easy to launch the contest, to get the best designs possible out of it you really have to give each designer as much feedback as possible during the both of the first two development and refinement stages. Now for my contest I got just over a dozen credible designers submitting nearly two dozen designs in the first stage. This was then whittled down to six designers for the second stage , who between the submitted another thirty or so designs.

Am I pleased with the quality of the designs that these folks came up with? Yes they’ve been astonishingly good – so much so that I’m going to post links and samples from some of the runners up because it was such an overwhelmingly positive experience that I really want to pay these folks back in some way.

But has it taken countless hours of work on my side to review and feedback on all these designs, to launch and collate poll results, and then more time to work with winning designer to make all the final refinements. Yes it certainly has.

Has that added up to my first publication deadline (to publish the first book in my Flames of Time series before Christmas) being severely squeezed? Oh yes.

But is the end in sight, and will I be happy with the final product, yes it is, and yes I suspect I will.

Will I hit my second publishing deadline (to publish the first episode of my Glass Darkly story by end of Feb 2015), yes, but it will be a lot easier if I can get some good writing days in over the Xmas period while I’m off work.