Hey again, everyone!  I just wanted to throw all of you some quick updates on my writing progress, changes, new things, etc.  So here goes.

1.  Audiobooks - I'm doing an AI voice assisted (aka, robovoice) series of audiobooks on Youtube.  I'm only doing the first three capters of book 1 from each of my big series (Land of the Lions, Earthfleet, and Offworld Chronicles) using these voices, and I'm only posting those first three chapters each on Youtube as a teaser.  The primary reason is, while audiobooks are good, robo audiobooks are not.  That much I'm figuring out pretty quickly.  They're good for helping in proofing and editing, but they're too much work, and aren't quality enough yet to even come close to replacing humans in production level work.  But, for now, until my budget improves (which it will, as I'm making good progress in that direction) I'm not doing any audiobooks beyond what I've done so far with the robo voices and the already recorded audiobooks done by human readers (aka, both Steves) for my pocket guides.

     However, FEAR NOT!  I haven't given up on the audiobooks yet.  The big hangup is that they're stupid expensive (about $2k-$2500 each) to produce professionally, and I have 23 books needing convertiong, so that's going to be a substantial investment.  But I WILL be doing them, baring something getting in the way of that.  Right now I'm just waiting for the budget to straighten out, and some bills to be paid off, and then I can afford to do that.  I'm also waiting for 2024 to blow over.  IF you haven't seen the absolute clown show that the world has become, you're not paying attention.  That being said, that's one of the things that's gonna be holding things up.  The other is the print books, which I will cover in a moment.  In the meantime, anything going up on Youtube that doesn't already have a professional audiobook attached to it, will be done with the robovoices.

     This is especially true of the short stories I'm doing for Short Story Fridays.  So basically the plan is, for the free short stories I'm posting, to keep using the robovoices, and eventually do all the big novel series with regular human voices via professional readers.  But, again, I need the money first, as I have almost no budget to do anything right now. ^_^;;  Also, these will lag behind the print books by quite an amount.  Since they're more involved, and harder to update once released, I'm going to be working on getting everything literally spot on perfect first via the print books before moving to the audiobooks last.

2.  Print Books - This is...well, proving to be a real boondoggle.  The biggest hangup so far is Draft2Digital.  They were supposed to have converted my account, along with a lot of other people's, way back LAST YEAR!!  Like, 2022 last year.  Not even 2023.  In fact, they're so far behind right now that I may not be able to get started on th is until the end of 2024.  Yeah, it's that F'ed up right now, excuse the language.  So, alas, I'm stuck with publishing my books as ebooks, and ebooks only for now. *sigh*  Once they get their act together, and get things moved over, I'll start working on these.  But I have no idea how much longer it'll be until that happens.  So, unfortunately, there will be no print books for now.

3.  New Releases - The only thing I have on the agenda for new releases right now is "Homecoming", book 1 of the After Offworld series.  It still needs some spit and polish, but I'll be releasing that hopefully soon.  ETA is probably mid-February at this point.  I'll make an official announcement once it's available.

4.  Me Reading My Own Books? - I'm putting this out there to all of you as a question because, well, some of you have asked, and yet I don't feel confident in doing them myself.  I mean, I'm an introvert, and I'm not the best at recording my own audiobooks.  I tried in the past, and was really appalled at the quality of my own reading.  The books were good, but the reader wasn't so much. ^_^;;  But, if you guys want me to try it again, I'm willing to give it a spin.  Just let me know. Thanks.

And with that, I end this writing update. :)