On Surgery, Job Changes, and Writing

Hey guys!

So first off, good news. My son Marcus has just gone through the second surgery of his life about three weeks ahead of schedule, and now has a digestive tract that is in one piece. We ended up spending most of the day in the hospital with him. He was a little hungry because they didn't want to keep feeding him just before putting him under for a surgery, but other than that he was a real trooper throughout the whole thing. The doctors were pretty optimistic about his recovery too, especially since he didn't seem to need to keep the breathing tube in once he came out of it. So who knows, my son might actually come home way ahead of schedule.

We also got the chance to speak with his pulmonologist as well. He's going to be the guy that Marcus has at the CF clinic in Philadelphia for the first three years or so, which means he had plenty of advice and information for us. It was good to talk to him, and he managed to reassure us a lot about what was going on with Marcus and where we would be going from there.

In more good news, I started a new day job this week. It's going to be a good opportunity to grow and learn new skills, and they've already been really understanding and helpful for me, so I've been very lucky to make the transition. The job is also much more in the field I would like to go into for a stable, permanent career, so there's that upside as well. It's basically a wonderful opportunity that's come at a great time, though I will miss my old coworkers a little bit. Change always comes, whether we are ready for it or not!

Finally, Eagle and Broken Halo both seem to be doing fairly well. I've decided to continue the price promotion on the earlier books, at the very leas until the end of the month. The exception to that would be the German edition of Wolfhound, which is already back up to its previous price. Aside from that, I've been scraping out the time to write here and there, and hopefully I will be able to recover a little bit as things start to get back to normal.

In any case, I hope everyone is doing well out there, and I will see you around!

On 2014 Publication Plans

Well, as we're finishing up preparations to publish Eagle and Broken Halo this year, I guess it is time to try and predict what we will be able to get done next year. It isn't the easiest thing to try and predict how much work will get done in a year, especially when things like a new baby, job changes and other things are on the horizon. That's kind of what got me into trouble with my predictions last year. A bunch of things cropped up partway through the year that I hadn't counted on when I planned to do four books in a year again, and as a result I'm only managing to get half of those books published before the year's end.

So as a result I think I will be a bit more conservative with what I will plan on doing. Hopefully that will lead to better estimates and more consistent work rather than the less productive schedule I tried to force myself to keep in 2013.

Looking at what I have ready so far, and about what shape it's in, I think that the following is going to be my goal. Glasswitch is still on my production list, and has actually reached a pretty good state. A couple more revisions and I believe it will be ready for 2014. So we'll put that one on the schedule at least.

Another novel I want to publish is the sequel to Broken Halo, called Shattered Wings. I figure that I should get something sci fi out next year, and I think that after Eagle I might need to give the universe of Jacob Hull a short rest, if only to make sure that I have developed enough as a writer to do the series justice. Since Shattered Wings would be a bit shorter, I think it is a much more reasonable target to hit within a year, though it would probably be closer towards the end of the year.

Those are probably the two full-length stories I'll do, but I would also like to try a bit of an experiment next year. I would like to start up some novels in serial fashion, since that would allow me to more consistently get material out, and I think that some of the stuff I've been working on will fit that pattern. One is a fantasy novel that I am writing in segments, tentatively titled Gerrod of Northwood. I think I will be able to get two of them out next year. The other is a cyberpunk novel I am currently extensively rewriting, The Social Contract. I think I'll only get one or two sections of that one out next year. Both would be a bit cheaper and shorter than my usual stuff, but again I would be able to get them out more consistently than I have been. Hopefully that would catch people's interest a bit more? We'll have to see.

In any case, thanks to everyone for staying with me on this journey. It's been an incredible experience to develop my skills as a writer, and I hope that I will be able to continue to work on these projects in the coming year. See you around!

On A Quick Snapshot of Life

I'm not dead yet! Yeah!

So, I'm terrible at blogging. I think that's probably an obvious thing to most people by now, but I might as well get that out there. It's probably the same kind of fault I have in terms of writing a journal, only here the failure is quite a bit more public. Ah, well...

In any case, here are some of the things that have been keeping this writer/husband/father/etc busy over the past few weeks. I might revisit some of these things later just to give them a bit of depth, but I might as well give some kind of an overview, right?

First up, with the collaboration of a wonderful translator by the name of Michael Drecker, we are going to have a German translation of Wolfhound up in a couple of weeks. There is a free sample up for the rest of this week, with the first eight chapters or so available. It's been an interesting experiment in foreign publishing for me, so I hope that it will turn out well. Here goes nothing!

Second, progress has continued on the third Jacob Hull book, Eagle. It has not gone as quickly as I might have liked, but I think that the book really will turn out better thanks to the changes I am making. It had a few pacing issues that needed to be worked out, which seems to be an intensely difficult revision to make. Unfortunately, that means that I likely won't make my August deadline for publishing it, but that's the way life goes sometimes. At the very least I will be publishing something I am confident in, which counts for more than punctuality in this case.

Third, I'm going to have to do a major rewrite of The Social Contract before it sees the light of day. Recent events have taken some of the villainous aspects of the bad guys in the book out of fiction and into reality, so that makes the whole premise a little less workable. It's scary when a piece of your cyberpunk dystopia novel becomes obsolete, not because of advances in technology or societal changes, but because it's already a part of our daily lives. Whatever else you might think of the PRISM thing, it has certainly made the lives of sci fi writers much harder, which I think we can all agree is the important thing here!

Fourth, I'm going to start taking graduate courses in computer science, beginning in the fall. No, it's not related to the previous topic, it's more just a gradual career shift required by our current situation. Any suggestions, heckling, stories, or advice would be appreciated. My main concern is that my cheapo, three year old laptop isn't going to be up to snuff, but I may just replace it before we start. I've been noticing some major problems with this one, and it may just be time to get something new.

Fifth, because I like to bury the lead, we're having another kid! My wife is yet again expecting, and we're both really happy about it. It is going to be a bit scary, since child number one is kind of active and challenging at times, but it will be kind of cool to see how our family grows. Unfortunately, this may be the time where I have to admit that I am an adult now. Sad, but probably true.

So there you have it, life as it is right now for me. The next few weeks...well, maybe the next few years are going to be interesting, so we shall see how I get through it. Thanks for all your support out there guys, and I hope your life goes as well or better than mine. See you around!

On Burnout

Yep, you can probably tell this post will be a cheerful one.

So burnout is something that I think every writer hates to imagine happening to them. Part of it is the fact that any writer who is truly invested in the work they are doing hates to believe that the day will come that they will wake up, look at that wonderful fresh blank screen or that manuscript in slight need of refinement and say "Man I don't have the energy for this today." Another part is the fact that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of advice on how to get over burnout. It's not quite the same thing as writer's block, where you are trying to get past a difficult part of a story or something. It's more a sudden exhaustion of your ability to create things, a fatigue that settles over you and prevents you from going through the whole process of writing, and that is a whole different animal to fight off. There's kind of an impression that makes it seem almost impossible to recover from.

In any case, burnout is probably what I managed to achieve for myself the past few months, and I've been paying the price for it lately. After publishing Murders, I launched into a rewrite of Broken Halo, quickly followed by writing over a hundred thousand words in Eagle's rough draft. At the same time, I was working quite a bit of overtime for my day job, trying to figure out a new career path for myself and my family, moving to a new apartment, and dealing with the everyday chaos that occasionally happens in life. Needless to say, I was a bit overconfident about my ability to handle that much of a workload, and my productivity after that point kind of broke down as I was trying to start a new project.

Since then I've been struggling to recover somewhat, a fact that's been reflected more or less here on my blog. My apologies to the handful of you who were looking for more updates here. I'll skip the stereotypical promise to update more frequently, but I hope that I won't vanish for months again this time. I also hope that no one takes this post as a sign that I am not planning on finishing the series that I've already started. Eagle will come out this year, though likely later than originally planned, as will Broken Halo. Glasswitch and Social Contract might be held off until the following year by necessity, but then again publishing eight or nine novels in two years was a bit ambitious for a part time writer.

In any case, I'm still working along, and hopefully avoiding the burnout this time. I hope all of you are doing well, and I will see you around.

Progress Update

So just a quick note this week on how things are going. Not much else was going on this week, so it's a boring post. Sorry.

Broken Halo's out to alpha readers, who I hope will enjoy it. My writing time is currently being divided between the first draft of Eagle and the next draft of Glasswitch. Eagle is going rather well at the moment; we're about thirty six thousand words into the story, which by my estimate says we're at the one-third point. At the rate I am writing, I should be finished with the first draft in about four more weeks--again, if nothing horribly unexpected happens. Glasswitch is going rather well too--the edits I'm coming up with are definitely going to improve the story, and the pace is about what I'd hoped for. It's a smaller novel, so I'm hoping to finish this draft by the beginning of February, and then move on to the second draft of Social Contract. After Eagle, I'll do a first draft of Airships over London, the next book in the Kingsley series.

That's the schedule for the beginning of 2014! It should be interesting to see if I can keep this pace up. Missing quite a bit of sleep, but that should just improve my writing, right? At least, that's what the sleep-deprivation-hallucinations tell me. They wouldn't lie, would they?

In any case, we are on track to do quite a bit this year, and I would say that we are off to a good start. hope everyone is doing all right out there, and I'll see you around.

On A Year of Publishing

So as of this month, I've been an independent author for over a year. Since December 2012, I've published five books, written a few others, and have some working their way through the revisions process for this year. I'd say that is a pretty good accomplishment for a year's worth of experience.

Unfortunately, it looks like my beginner's luck has come to an end. Wolfhound was an incredible success, but it looks like I am going to have to work through some hard times before I can replicate it again. To be honest, it is a little relieving to come to that conclusion. I've always been better at working hard and building up slow rather than depending on the occasional brilliantly lucky shot. If 2013 I grind through a lot of work again with far less reward, than so be it.

So, onto the lessons I've learned as an independent author for the year 2012. Based on my wealth of experience and wisdom, of course. Heh heh.

First of all, I've learned to not sweat reviews so much. There is nothing so exciting as getting a good review; similarly, there is nothing so frustrating and maddening as getting a poor review. It's twice as hard if the poor review critiques something you feel was misunderstood, something outside the initial purpose of the book, or just mean-spirited. Initially, I tried to manage those ups and downs as they came, and made a promise to myself that I would personally respond to every review, no matter the rating. The best decision I made was to stop doing that. The reviews gave me such a rollercoaster of happiness and outright rage that it became hard to actually focus on writing. I would worry about what to say to this comment or how to respond to that critique until I was tied up in knots and couldn't continue with my current project. Of course, that resulted in a bunch of crap I had to wade through just to get to producing something again, and generally wasn't worth the effort I stuck into it. I think it's telling that the moment I stopped responding and focused on writing instead, I managed to write a full novel in about nine weeks. So, first lesson learned: when a bad review comes in, don't sweat it and go write something.

Second, I've learned what should be realtistic for me in terms of setting goals and publication deadlines. When I went into 2013, I set the goal to have one book out every three months. It sounded like an achievable goal, and it was something I put a lot of pressure on myself to do. Unfortunately, I had failed to plan for the unexpected. Those unanticipated factors (moving a thousand miles with two weeks notice, changing jobs and work schedules, my sister's wedding, ecetera, ecetera...) added up to delays I couldn't have possibly expected, but I still put loads of stress and anxiety over those deadlines in spite of it. On top of that, I'd locked myself into those deadlines by publishing them in my books. While I think publishing the fact that the books were coming was a good idea, I don't think that trying to set them in stone was a bright move on my part. Life has a way of throwing the unexpected at you, and if a major publishing house can't manage to dodge delays or disasters, I shouldn't try to hold myself to an impossible standard until I have more experience in the field. So for now, rather than month or even season specific deadlines, I think I'm going to stick to announcing which year I expect the book to be out, at the very least until the book comes back from the copy editor. Otherwise, I'm just setting myself up for stress-related breakdowns and failure--and I have no doubt that life has enough of those planned for me without my own decisions adding to the mix.

Third, sequels are really, really different from first books. That may seem a little like common-sense, but I can't stress enough how different it is to work on the second book compared to the first. The challenges are different from what you expect out of a first book. You have to worry about character consistency, development on a much larger scale, all while trying to preserve what made the first book work. The worldbuilding has to go much deeper, while remaining consistent with the first book, and that occasionally presents an obstacle all on its own if you played a little free and loose with things before. All in all, it's felt a little like I've been learning to write an entirely different kind of book, and to be honest, I'm still trying to work out the best way of doing it. Hopefully I'll get better at that formula as time goes on.

Fourth, keep your business finances separate from your personal finances. Ugly, terrible, nasty things will happen to you otherwise. Sandra Tayler gave that advice at the LDS Storymaker's conference this past year, and certain events have proven it very wise counsel. Without going into the unpleasant details, just trust me on this one. It will save you a load of grief and pain later on.

Fifth, and final, I think I have refined my ability to revise. Going into this, I had thought that my revision techniques had already gotten as good as they were going to get, but I was wrong. I've managed to identify a bit better what steps I need to go through to end up with a good story, and I am looking forward to employing them in the new year.

So there you have it, my incredibly deep and probably boring post on lessons learned in 2013. The next year looks like it may be a hard one, but I am looking forward to it. Every challenge brings an opportunity to grow, and as difficult as the past year might have been, I think I have a lot more to learn. At the very least, the journey should be interesting. I hope everyone is having a good start to their new year, and I'll see you around.

On Kingsley's New Cover

So we officially have a cover for the next Hector Kingsley book! Here it is. It has once again been provided through the skill of Mr. Robert Ennis, who has once again outdone himself. The book is now off to the copy editor, and I am hoping to have the thing ready before the end of the year. Here's hoping nothing drastically terrible happens, right? Aheh.

Heh. Yeah... Seriously, it would be nice if that didn't happen.









In any case, the other news is that Kingsley's first novel is now on sale. I think that I will leave the price this low through December and January, in the hopes that it will get people excited about the sequel. If you haven't bought it yet, go ahead and try it now! I think it's a really good story, though I suppose I am a bit biased.

Anyway, hope all is going well for everyone, and I'll see you around!

On Another One Down

So, yeah, I haven't been posting here, mostly because I've been a bit occupied. Broken Halo's first draft has more or less consumed my free time and thinking space since I finished publishing Badger and Iron Angels mid-August. It is a good sign that the story kind of caught me up like that, or at least I hope it is. In any case, I managed to write like a maniac the past few weeks and put the finishing touches on the rough draft last Friday. On a related note, I think I've actually crossed the magic one million words of rough drafts mark that is supposed to mean I won't suck anymore. So for everyone who has been enjoying (or by the reviews, not enjoying) my work, don't worry. It will get better. :)

Anyway, finishing Broken Halo means I'm able to shift my focus to other projects now. First up on the list is going to be Hector Kingsley: Murders in Whitechapel. The book has been sitting on the backburner for a while, mainly due to my preoccupation with other projects, but I think that now that I've more or less overdosed on space operas for four months, some steampunk is in order. Fortunately, I've been cooking up quite a few interesting ideas for our stuffy, erudite investigator, and I think the upcoming draft will provide a much better story than I had before. My goal is to pretty much rip through the revisions in about three weeks--a pace which kind of intimidates me when I think too much about it, but it feels right. Here's hoping I don't screw everything up!

Eagle is going to need a bit more pondering before I'm really ready to start into it. I'm hesitant to get really in depth on it now, both because of the risk of burning myself out, and because I am worried about getting obsessed with it like I did with Broken Halo. I need to revise stuff sometime, and that means I will just poke along for a bit with the rough draft until I can turn my full attention to it.

Other than that, my progress seems to be going fairly well. Books are selling, I'm somewhat less close to utter and complete madness, and I think I am doing alright. Thanks for your patience with my little update here; I will try to get a few more posts up if I get the chance. In any case, I will see you all later!

On Badger

So as I'm finishing up the rewrite of Badger this week, I thought I would give you guys a preview of the cover for it. It was once again drawn by Paul Hamblin, the artist who drew the cover for Wolfhound. He tells me it is just about done, just a few small tweaks and we are ready to go. That puts us on a pretty good schedule, since the plan is now to release both Badger and Iron Angels on August 14th. Now if we could just get the book done as well... See you around!

On Restructuring

So I've made a few changes to the blog! I'm probably going to keep making the occasional modification to the layout here over the next couple of weeks. The way things were arranged before just grew a bit stale, and I don't feel like it was working out very well. Let me know if you like it/hate it/gave a great big "meh" when you saw it.

Along with that, I've been trying to reorganize how I will be doing my work over the next eight weeks or so. Over the next week or so, I am anticipating a lot of the penultimate revision of Badger to get done. In fact, if I can just manage to buckle down and get to work, I may actually get the revision done this week and send it out to the copy editor early. That way we can have a secure deadline to publish it by August 14th.

While the copy editor has Badger, I will be turning my attention to other projects. Namely, I'm going to be pushing through Eagle as quickly as I can. I wrote Badger's rough draft in a crazy rush last year about this time, and I turned out to have a pretty good book at the end. I hope to do the same this time, so that we can have that book ready sometime in early 2013.

At the same time, I am going to try and get chunks of the Iron Angels final draft done. That way, by the time Badger comes back and is ready to rewrite, I can have Iron Angels done and ready to put up at exactly the same time. No muss, no fuss, just two more books done, and one left to go to meet my goal of four books in 2012.

Well, that's all the news for now. Hope everyone's doing well, and I will see you later!

On Schedule Changes

So I suppose it would be good for me to admit something at this point. Iron Angels won't be coming out in May.

That might be kind of obvious, given that we are on the last day of the month. Hope springs eternal, I guess. :) Unfortunately due to delays caused by our move to Pennsylvania, other projects, and the unavoidable craziness my life seems to attract, the possibility of getting the book out this month wasn't very high.

Which, of course, means I now have a decision to make. I can either continue to work on Iron Angels until it is in publishable condition and get it out during the month of June. That would mean putting off the revisions on Badger until Iron Angels is completely done, possibly delaying that book as well, which is something that might get me mobbed. :) Alternatively, I can shift my focus to work on Badger and finish up the work on Iron Angels at a later point. One way will minimize the delay before Iron Angels hits the market, while the other preserves the rest of my schedule for Badger and the other books.

As I've been thinking about it, though, the best option seems to be the second one. Iron Angels is in the final stages; that means it will only need a short, final revision to touch things up before it is ready to go. I think that if I get Badger ready during June, send it to the copy editor by the end of the month, and turn my attention to Iron Angels after that, I can have Iron Angels ready before I get Badger back at the end of July. Then I can pour my efforts into getting Badger ready, which I will hope to get out by the middle of August. That way, instead of stressing myself to my limits and possibly rushing the development of these two stories, I can take each at its own pace, and probably have both of them ready by mid-August. They'll be released at the same time so that they can support each other, which might be a benefit that I won't complain too much about.

There are benefits to doing things the other way as well, but I think they are more than outweighed by the costs in time, effort, and most importantly, sanity. Putting too much pressure on myself to get everything done at a preset time, without consideration for the usual chaos that infects my life, will do more harm than good in the long run. By taking a more measured approach, I can have both books out before the end of the year, and hopefully arrive at my next project with my wits intact.

So yeah, if you are waiting for Iron Angels to come out right now, I apologize for the let down. It has taken me a while to admit it, but it turns out I am human too, and can fail. Blergh. Rest assured, however, that my schedule for Badger remains unchanged. My rewrites on that are starting as we speak, and the alpha readers have pretty much all gotten back to me. That project has me both excited, scared half to death and ready to start. Let's hope no more crazy hops in the way this time.

In any case, I'll see you around!

On Tweets and Meets

So we're back from the LDS Storymakers conference! It was an awesome experience. We got to meet a lot of people (including Ailsa from our writing group! and Aneeka, also occasionally from our writing group!) and listen to a lot of incredibly interesting lectures on writing. The entire thing took pretty much two whole days, so I will try to distill some of the best parts into a five highlight list.

1. Yes, Howard Tayler, I will work very, very hard. Enough said.

2. Sandra Tayler managed to make finances both scary enough to pay attention to and managable enough that I am not totally panicking. Not bad for someone with a Humanities major.

3. Per David Wolverton, sci fi is about a sense of wonder. I should make an extra effort at including that. Heh heh heh...

4. No matter how well your day went at a writing conference, it will always still suck to come home to water leakage and fans trying to dry out your carpet.

5. I won a door prize! It included a discount for a content edit through Eschler Editing. Now what would I use that for... :) Mwahahahaha!

So those are some of the highlights. It was a lot of fun! I will probably write more about the whole thing later. Just giving a quick update.

Speaking of quick updates, I am now on Twitter. Not sure how I like it yet, but we will see what pithy remarks I can make to win the respect and admiration of the entire world, 140 characters at a time. Shouldn't be hard, right? Muttter, mutter, mutter...

On Cool Stuff and Getting Stuff Done

Alright, so first things first. Iron Angels second to last draft is finally done. Yeah! Now it is off to our esteemed copy editor, Tristi Pinkston. Hopefully that means we will be on track for a publication date in May, which at the moment looks increasingly likely.

That also means that I am now free to work on other projects again, namely The Social Contract's first draft and the Badger rewrite. I will hopefully have the alpha readers go over Badger during May, so that I can then spend most of June tearing it apart. Let me know if you want to help out with the whole process! As it is, Badger has a target publication month of August, and I think we have a very good chance of making that date too. After that, the only other book to get done during 2012 will be the sequel for Kingsley, subtitled Murders in Whitechapel, which hopefully will be ready by November.

Five books in less than a year. That's possible and not entirely crazy, right? Aheh heh...

On to other things. We have a cover being done for Badger at the moment, again by Paul Hamblin, our awesome artist from Wolfhound. He's sent me a few rough versions, and says he'll have the finished prodcut done soon. I'll post it when it's ready, so get excited for it!

We've also had an ad up occasionally on Girl Genius, and things have been going moderately well for us. I don't know how cost effective ads are for ebooks; perhaps it is the fact that we need people to buy the book and not just visit a comic? At the same time, Kingsley's been doing a bit better as a result, so I'm not complaining at all!

Also, at the end of this next week, Emily and I will be off to Utah to participate in the LDS Storymakers conference. It will be the first time going as an actual professional writer, so I'm kind of nervous. At the same time, we'll get to meet some of our writing friends and attend some cool panels and workshops, so it is totally worth it!

Finally, whoever did this is awesome, hands down. I'm on a freaking wiki! Huzzah!

Whew, lots of news, huh? Perhaps I should post here more often... oh well. Off to work! See you around!

On Adjusting the Balance

Alright, so the past couple of weeks have not been the best for writing. Some of this can be blamed on the move. Packing and shifting every ounce of your crap over a thousand miles can be rather...disruptive to a person's creative process. My shift in work schedule, workload, social interaction and family circumstances can all bear their share of the guilt as well.

Not everything can be blamed on that one choice, though. I am starting to worry, just a little, that I am crushing myself with my own expectations. Wolfhound succeeded so spectacularly that I began to get a bit carried away with delusions of grandeur and hopes of being a self sufficient writer by the end of 2013. Realistically, as Wolfhound's sales start to settle down a bit from the post-Christmas writing craze and Kingsley continues to poke along at the okay-to-good level, I am glad we haven't left the day job just yet.

Right at that same moment, when my wildest dreams are fading back to a more humdrum practicality, I've landed in a pretty comfy spot. My new job is no longer an exercise in crazy, I can sleep, attend church and act almost like most normal people, and I now live rather close to family instead of a time zone away. That is a level of comfort that we haven't had in a long while, and I worry that it is lulling me to slack off on my writing almost as badly as my crushing burdens in Texas were.

But perhaps all of this is merely an example of excuse finding. Maybe I simply need to regain my focus, settle my shoulders, and get back into it. Yet where do I begin? Any ideas? Blergh.

In any case, I will get back to work on Iron Angels. No rest for the wicked...

On Finding the Steampunks

So Kingsley is still doing pretty well--not quite Wolfhound well, but not incredibly poorly either. I think the reason that it hasn't quite taken off yet is because the audience for Wolfhound is very different from the audience for Kingsley. One is a spaceship, railgun action adventure, while the other is a steampunk mystery with a lot of character and banter. While there might a few fans who crossover between the two genres, it is not as much as I imagined at the start.

So my evil scheme to net more readers for Kingsley has moved to the ever-dreaded marketing phase. (Mwaha!) My plan is to run an ad or two on Girl Genius and see if I can attract people from there. Before I can do that, though, I need to use ads that will catch people's attention. For that I'm probably going to need your help, as I couldn't artist my way out of a paper bag. :)

Fortunately, my friend Aneeka, of Not a Villain fame, has lent me a hand. Below are a couple of her ideas, using concept art from Mr. Bob Ennis, the artist behind the cover for Kingsley. (Man, what is with me and links today?) They were actually good enough that I almost want to use them without taglines, but let me know what you guys think. After all, Kingsley is kind of counting on us to make this count! See you around!

On a Review for Kingsley!

So we have a review for Hector Kingsley that went up! Emily Mah Tippets was kind enough to read over the book and offer her thoughts on it. You can find her review on Amazon, Goodreads, and a longer verion on her blog. She liked it! Always a good thing. Thanks to Mrs. Tippets for her support, and I hope she enjoys the rest of the series! You know, once I've gotten to the point where it is published and all...

Also, I have now added the link to the Kingsley hardcover. Sorry about the brief delay there.

See you around!

On Baby Steps

So first off, and most exciting of my current news, is the fact that Sera has officially began to walk. She took her first steps on Friday, and she has been practicing every day since then. Her record so far has been four solid steps in a row. She is quickly catching on to the fact that this is a BIG DEAL, especially with her grandparents joining her parents in the congratulations. She is growing up way too fast, but every little smile she gives makes the entire journey.

Also, I am proud to announce that we have put the hardcover up for Hector Kingsley's first book. This copy has the excerpt that I included as bonus content for those buying the more expensive paper edition. Given that it is pretty much just an appendix with extra background material, those who choose to read the electronic version will not miss out on anything relating to Hector's adventures, nor on anything relating to Patricia, Benjamin, or the rest of the Kingsley crew. It is, however, pretty cool background, so if you like the world of the Distillation, then feel free to investigate a copy.:)

In all honesty, I plan on publishing all the excerpts, along with more material, in a companion book someday, but just not yet. So if you really want to read the stuff, you will get the chance to see it electronically. Just not until the series is done. Heh heh heh...

In any case, we are starting to get settled in here in Pennsylvania. My job has been going pretty well, and as I get adjusted to it, the oppoortunities I have to write and develop my ideas increase. Hopefully that will lead to some progress this week. I will let you know! See you later!

On Revisions and New Stories

So I've started on the revision schedule that I had planned for February. The fact that I'm moving in less than two weeks has kind of complicated things, but not too badly. The plan is to do a quick readthrough of Badger, mainly to remove characters that shouldn't be in some of the scenes, refine some of the relationships, and organize the whole book a bit better. That part of the effort has gone well so far, and I am happy to say that I think I will finish that pretty soon.

Revision plan number two is to move on to Murders once Badger is done. Murders needs a pretty similar treatment, with a few more detailed revisions to iron out some of the inconsistencies. My hope is to finish that by the end of the month so that I can dive into a revision of Iron Angels after that.

As far as new stories, I've started Social Contract now in earnest. I guess a lot of my obstacles in that story had to do with what kind of a story the book was turning out to be. It's very hard to write a book that touches on societal conditions and politics without turning preachy, and the initial sections of the story seemed to be headed in that direction. After a few weeks of writer's block and a lot of pondering, I think I've got the direction of the story figured out, though, so hopefully I can dive right into the meat of things! My goal on that one is to have the first draft done by the end of March, so that I can start on Eagle, the third Jacob Hull book.

That's the plan for now, at least. I'm sure the move will require some...adaptations...but I remain confident that I can get all of this done on time. After that, it should be a pretty straight shot from here to the beginning of May, when Iron Angels will launch, and after that I just have Badger and Murders to get up in the summer and fall respectively. Meanwhile, I need to be working on the novels that will hopefully be ready to launch through 2013, namely Social Contract, Eagle, Airships Over London, and Iron Angels 2.

Sigh. When did the hours of the day get to be so few...

On A New One Up!

So The True Adventures of Hector Kingsley will now be up on Amazon! Just a few hours for Amazon to review it, and it will go live. That makes book two of this little publishing effort, and book one of the year 2012. I'm just hoping that the story manages to shine as much as Wolfhound has. Hopefully those little voices murmuring at me that it will all end in failure can shut up now. Blergh.

In any case, go read the book! We will be getting more versions up today and tomorrow. See you around!

On Relief

There is nothing better than finishing the copy edit of a book. Kingsley's ready for the final readthrough, and that's more about enjoying the story and the tone and all. Maybe another week and the madness will be over.

Relaxing sighs on three, two, one...

Ahhhhh...