It’s been just a month now since I released “Broken Shards” on Amazon; and while I don’t have many sales or any reviews yet, either there or on goodreads, I thought I’d post an update on what I’ve been doing since then… or at least, on what I’ve been doing over the last week and my plans for the immediate writing future.

Work on book #2 (“Ghost Ship”) in the “Wandelaar van de Duisternis” series is coming along well. In the last week, I’ve written another 1500 words bringing the current word count to 70k. This is a prequel to “Broken Shards” rather than a sequel. It’s the story of my main protagonist Hauke through his teenage years, before he met the young ghost Sanne; growing up on the streets of Amsterdam and at the ADM squat, and his battles against the darkness during the Covid years. It features a number of the characters mentioned in “Broken Shards”, so those who have read my first novel can expect to learn more about his mentors Berhane and Genet; about his relationships with Hazel, Drishti and Keetje; his first encounter with the valkyrie Mist; the story of how he acquired the “Tijdgeest” and Persephone; and a few more clues concerning his parentage. I hope that Lilian will do the cover artwork for this book as well.
I’ve also been plotting out some details for an additional book of short stories (“Short Cuts”) featuring some of the characters from the series. So far, I have notes about how Hauke meets the Witte Wijf Agata and her family, what Nicole does after leaving Amsterdam, and how Olga broke free from her government-enforced constraints.

 In addition to writing, I did some experiments linking Aeon Timeline with Scrivener, but these were only partly successful. When I tried to synch, Aeon Timeline removed my existing custom attributes from Scrivener, and couldn’t read the nested folders of characters, only those at the top level in the folder hierarchy, so it created new empty character stubs. I have my characters organised within folders by book or story, then whether they are living or dead, and with related characters grouped together in sub-folders. In theory, it would be useful if I could get that working because Aeon Timeline provides a good visualisation; but unless I can prevent it removing the metadata from Scrivener, it isn’t worth the problems that it creates, and the time that it takes to clean up again. Instead, I’ll continue working with my Excel spreadsheet for the timeline, and may look at writing a custom script that will update the spreadsheet directly from Scrivener.

Last weekend, I did a short interview about “Broken Shards” for the local newspaper. The resulting article can be found here. It still feels a bit strange being a published author, even if it’s self-published.

Next weekend, I’ll be visiting Drenthe for a long weekend with my extended Dutch family: it will be an opportunity to discover more about hunebedden (single-chamber megalithic tombs dating from the late Neolithic period) and early medieval farm cottages. This is part of my research for the short story about how Hauke met the young Agata (meisje Agata), her mother (moeder Agata) and grandmother (oma Agata)… yes, there are really three generations of Witte Wijven, all with the name Agata.