After eight months of blood, sweat, and tears (Okay, no tears. No blood, either. But certainly lots of sweat, especially during the past couple of months), Bad Unicorn is finally out!

I’ve never put as much effort into a writing project as I did with Bad Unicorn. I spent more time brainstorming, writing, revising, editing, and proofreading than I have for anything else I’ve done so far. It’s been a lot of hard work, but it’s been totally worth it.

I’m always trying to improve. I want to be better today than I was yesterday. This applies to every aspect of my life. I want to be a better father, a better son, a better brother, and a better friend. I’m always trying to improve my body and my mind. And, of course, I’m always trying to improve my writing.

Self-improvement isn’t always easy. In fact, it’s usually very hard. But it’s always worth it. What makes self-improvement hard isn’t the effort but the honesty it requires. In order to improve yourself, you need to figure out where you’re fucking up. And sometimes it’s hard to admit to ourselves that we’re doing anything wrong.

After writing the first draft of Bad Unicorn, I knew that I’d made a lot of mistakes. I fixed as many of them as I could, but still wasn’t happy with it. So, I did something I’ve never done before: I hired a professional editor to help me. It wasn’t easy having someone pick apart my work, telling me every little thing that I’d messed up. But it was worth it. It was so, so worth it.

I made a lot of the changes to Bad Unicorn that my editor suggested and I’m glad that I did. It’s still far from perfect, but it reads a lot better now than it did before I consulted her. The advice she gave not only helped me to improve Bad Unicorn, it will help me to write better stories in the future.

Some of the changes she suggested, I decided not to implement. I would’ve had to completely rewrite major parts of the book and I didn’t want to spend all that time on it. I thought it would be better to just get Bad Unicorn published so I could start on the next writing project. But I learned from everything she taught me and will make sure I don’t make the same mistakes in the future that I made writing this one.

If I’m being honest, I have mixed feelings about Bad Unicorn. On the one hand, I’m quite proud of it. I worked my ass off writing and editing it. I put more time, thought, and effort into it than anything else I’ve ever done. However, it’s not perfect. It could be better. But I didn’t want to get stuck perpetually rewriting it and never getting it published. That’s a mistake a lot of writers make. It’s better to publish something that’s not perfect, learn from it, and start writing the next one than to get stuck on one project forever.

It is said that the first million words you write will suck. Like anything, you have to write for a long time before you start getting good at it. I’ve been keeping track of how many words I write every day since I started this writing journey in 2014 and I’m almost to my millionth word (To get an idea of how many that is, Bad Unicorn is about 75,000-words long). So, in other words, I’m still in the suck period. I’m still learning. I’m still making mistakes. But I’m getting better all the time.

I can say with confidence that Bad Unicorn is the best book I’ve written so far. I learned from the mistakes I made on the books before it and will learn from the mistakes I made on this one. Then, I’ll apply what I’ve learned when writing future books, making them even better. That’s the goal – to always be improving.

So, what’s next for Ellis Michaels? Now that Bad Unicorn is done, I’m working on a new project. This one is going to be different than anything I’ve done and likely won’t appeal to many readers of my science fiction and fantasy books. But it’s something I’ve wanted to write for years. It’s a memoir about living with a rare illness called Behcet’s Disease. I was diagnosed as a teenager and it’s fucked my life up in ways that are just too interesting to not write about.

I’m hoping to have the memoir come out around the end of the year. Then, I’ll get started on the next fiction book, whatever that may be. But for now, I’m going to enjoy the rest of the summer and focus on the memoir.

If you read Bad Unicorn, I hope you like it. I had a lot of fun writing it. It was inspired by someone I know who has unicorn stuff all over her apartment: pictures, sculptures, and other decorations. Seeing all those unicorns got my creative juices flowing. The idea of a not-so-nice unicorn popped into my head and I thought it would be a fun thing to write about. I was right. It was.

Part of me wanted to make Xavier, the unicorn, really bad. Another part of me wanted to write Bad Unicorn as a children’s book, making Xavier just a tiny bit mean. Ultimately, I landed somewhere in the middle. Xavier’s got attitude but he’s no so unlikable that you hope he gets killed by the end of the second chapter.

I had so much fun writing this book that I may consider writing another book about unicorns someday. They really are fascinating. Before getting started on Bad Unicorn, I knew very little about these horny creatures. I did a lot of research and enjoyed learning about unicorns. They’ve been a part of our collective consciousness for centuries and aren’t going away any time soon. And people seem to love the idea of unicorns now more than ever.

Thank you, if you’ve read or are planning to read Bad Unicorn. It just might change the way you look at unicorns forever. It certainly changed the way that I’ll look at them forever!