Author Update February 12, 2026
Life has been absolutely crazy. I have had personal victories and tragedies since the last post I made here. If you’ve been following my tiktok account, you are probably aware of some of it. But this last few months, my author career has taken a positive turn!
Last weekend, I went to my first big book festival, and I sold a lot of books. It feels good when another author comes to your table because they’ve seen so many people carrying your book to their table, and they have to see what it’s about. I also met a bunch of other authors, editors, and publishers, as well as bought a few books!
January, I had my first Author event in Georgia, which culminated in the bookstore selling out of Midnight Over Moores.
Such success has been difficult to imagine, but to have it happen has been wonderful.
As for the writing half of things, I have two books slotted for publication this year. One in the next few months, and another towards the end of the year. The fantasy book I mentioned in my 2024 post ended up getting moved back in the series due to my local betas telling my I need to make the background more digestible. The only way I could figure that was writing a whole other novel, which my betas have been thoroughly enjoying so far. I’ve got about 55k words in it already, but the book will be done closer to 120k.
The biggest success is moving to another state, back to Georgia, and I’ll be finishing the sequel to Midnight Over Moores, Ghosts on Gaston by the end of the month, entering the final editing process. It’s been a long time coming, but middle of last year, the worst writer’s block I’ve had with any book broke, and it’s been coming relatively easy since.
I’ve also plotted out several other books to get around to.
Author Update July 6, 2024
This is my first post on this website, but if you’ve been following me on tiktok, I’ve been doing a monthly author update like this for months now.
So, what has changed so far? Well, I’ve added 3 chapters to my novel, but I’ve actually trimmed back my word count a bit. Don’t fret. This is a good thing. While I’ve added 3 chapters to my book, they are not done, just planned and blocked out, so I know what to put there that will fit the story better with what I have now.
This is mostly because I could not be ok with the mathematical problems of travel times in my book. Again, if you’ve been watching my tiktoks, one of my first popular videos was acting this out as a sketch. While I thought I had the paths figured out, there were a few things that kept bothering me about it, and I had to fix them, which did change quite a few things.
Not to mention I have at least another 5 more chapters to add in that I haven’t exactly figured out where they fit in the draft. I know when they happen, but not where they appear in the text. Ah, the problems of spider-web editing.
I also have an official regional map for the first book. The app I used to make it, although, could not handle the full world map to scale, so I’ve been breaking that down and puzzle piecing that back together, which is … frustrating.
I did submit a portion of this book for a literary award, so fingers crossed they like it. I’ll learn in a month.
Fantasy word count: 113,906
Also, the contemporary romance book is at chapter 10, finishing the first act (it’s only got another chapter or so), and coming along nicely. I’ve also got a title for it and a book cover.
Contemp Rom word count: 9,574
Happy writing!!!
Hathaway Johnson Book 