Introducing Passage to Jarpara

The first draft of Passage to Jarpara, my 2024 novel is completed, and I'm hard at work on the second draft. I'll announce a solid release date when I'm confident I can make it, but I can pretty much promise that it will be released before the end of May 2024.

From a business point of view writing, Passage to Jarpara was a terrible choice. It's a well known fact that every book in a series sells fewer copies than the book that proceeded it. And with only some 3,400 copies of the previous book in the series, The Prisoner of Cimlye sold, I'll be lucky to sell 500 copies of the book in 2024. Now, compare that likely sales number to that of my 2023 stand alone novel The Girl on the Kerb with sales of almost 6,000 copies in its first year, you can see the clear advantage of stand alone books. Of course I need to point out that I was very lucky to have Amazon somehow promoting The Girl on the Kerb, out of the gate. It was an exception to the rule for my books. Still, nearly a thousand copies of a new release in its first year used to be a more typical result. Seeing that it gets ever harder to sell books out of the mainstream, 500 books may be optimistic. Nevertheless those 6,000 copies serve to illustrate the potential up side of a stand alone book, one that is not tied to the sales figures of the previous books in a series - unless, of course, that series is a bestseller.

In view of all this, why in the heck is this my 2024 novel, you ask? Simply because it's a story I wanted to write. I wanted to wrap up the series with Taef Lang landing his dream a job, and that's what this story is all about.

There was, however, one other important factor going for it, namely that I had actually started writing this story back in the fall of 2022, and with a few weeks' work put in on it in January of 2023, I started in on it again in earnest, beginning on the first of October 2023, with 45,000 words already written. Which is to say, potentially more than half of the book written. I'd stopped writing it because I needed to come up with some 30,000 to 40,000 words worth of scenes, incidents, and stuff to do to fill out the middle of the story, for which I had no clue. Still, 45K words was too large of a story fragment to leave undone, so this fall I decided to push ahead and trust that push come to shove, I'd come up with something to fill it out and get the darn thing done. And, lo and behold, I came up with enough scenes, incidents, and stuff to do to end up with a 106,000 word story. The million dollar question, however is; are all those scenes, incidents, and stuff entertaining? Iffy, as always.

I'll talk more about the substance of the story in the coming weeks. I'll just say that it's not an ambitious story. Rather it reflects my taste for small, slice of life stories. Which has been true of all my stories, but I've doubled down on that vibe since reading the stories from Molly Clavering and D E Stevenson. This story is simply an episodic travelogue, an account that takes Taef and Lessie, along with Sella and Carz, on a sea voyage across the Tropic Sea to the Jarpara Islands, in hopes of landing a job as a professor of Island archeology and/or history. That's the entire story arc; finding a job.

The one challenge that I wanted to tackle was to write Taef and Lessie as a married couple, to see what I could do with that situation. Usually I fade to black when my couples get close to that point. Spoiler alert: I don't think I nailed it.

I also wanted the opportunity to bring back some old side characters for a final bow. as well as introducing one new character that I thought it would be fun do. In short, this story offered me one last chance to revisit some of my favorite characters and setting. How successful I was at this, will be up to you to decide, dear reader.