Round Two! Write!

If you haven’t heard yet, then you obviously didn’t watch the video above. Earlier this week (or I guess last week if you count Sunday as the start of a new week), I signed a contract for book 2 in the Mattson Academy series. It’s going to be coming out September 3rd, 2024, almost exactly a year after the first book was released. This is exciting for a great many reasons, not the least of which because it means I get to keep on writing. I would have kept on writing anyway, but now more people get the chance to read it. I’ve been floored by the positive reaction the first book has gotten, and that culminating in getting a contract for book 2 just three months after book 1 was published is the icing on the cake. So how did we get here?

Mattson Academy is the first story I ever wrote. I started writing it in 2017, and it took six months to get the first draft done. From there, I spent a TON of time editing it, rewriting it, getting feedback, and editing it some more. I went through multiple revisions, all the while shopping it around to agents and publishers to no avail. It wasn’t until the end of 2021 that I was fortunate enough to find my publisher, BSC Publishing Group, and in early 2022 I was officially under contract.

That meant more editing! Almost another year’s worth of editing on and off to get everything just right and ready to publish. It was not my favorite part of the process by any stretch of the imagination, but in the end, I’m glad for it because I learned a lot, and I’m proud of the final product we put out.

But all that time, I was doing other stuff, too.

I wrote other books! I wrote a vampire novel. I started a weird west story about a bounty hunter. I did NaNoWriMo twice, once with a cyberpunk heist novel and once with a slightly supernatural murder mystery (a series I plan to revisit someday). I tried my hand at short stories (with little to no success).

Only after all that did I start writing Mattson Academy 2. It took me longer to write, almost a full year compared to the six months the first draft of Mattson 1 took. Some of that is the way COVID and my general life shift post-pandemic affected my writing. I used to have much more of a routine than I do these days. But I’ve started editing it now that the contract is signed and I’ve noticed something.

It’s clear this ain’t my first rodeo.

This is not to say that Mattson 2 is a better book than Mattson 1. I’ll let you all be the judge of that in about 10 months. But I think it’s going to take a lot less editing to get it to the same level of quality as book 1. A lot of the things I learned through writing in different genres and styles and getting feedback from readers all filtered in. Mattson 2 may or may not be a better story, but its first draft was WORLDS better than Mattson 1’s first draft.

I’m stoked to get to put out another book in this world. Mattson is my passion project. It’s my love letter to the fantasy genre, full of all the tropes I enjoy with both send-ups and subversions. I’m looking forward to working just as hard on Mattson 2 and letting the series continue and putting another great story out into the world.

I hope you’ll check them out!