As most who follow my blog know, The Eye and the Arm—Book two in the Champion of the Gods Series—is being released on April 14, 2015. It’s now on the DSP Publications Coming Soon Page and I’ve got the cover art to prove it. 😀 You can pre-order it here:
In connection with the re-release, DSP Publications is sending me on a virtual book tour and they are giving away a Kindle Voyage to one lucky winner. Click the Rafflecopter link below to enter:
As many of you know, The Last Grand Master is being re-released this Tuesday, February 10th. I’ve got some tour stops happening and I wanted to let you know that DSP Publications has donated a Kindle Voyage as the prize for my tour. I’ve got a bunch of stops (perhaps too many?) but they’re spread out pretty well. You can find the giveaway link on each of the tour stops.
First Love has been released and is now for free download! This is a short free prequel (or frequel as I call it) to The Last Grand Master. You can get it for free from DSP Publications and OmniLit, the non-romance side of Are or you can download a PDF copy from my site here: Download First Love
On Tuesday January 27th, First Love, will be released. This is a short free prequel (or frequel as I call it) to The Last Grand Master. It is now available for ‘pre-order’, from DSP Publications and from OmniLit, the non-romance side of ARe. In something of a quirk, if you want to get it from Amazon, they won’t let us list it for free, so you’ll have to pay .99 cents. Kindle readers need not worry, however as you can get it in .mobi format from the other two sites. Continue reading Something For Nothing: My Free Prequel Is Available Jan 27th
So After many months of start and stop, of rewriting while trying to keep the story intact, I’ve finished the rough draft of Book 2 – The Eye And The Arm.Those who’ve followed my blog know I struggled with this. Not because I didn’t have the story set, but because I had to make the story fit within a word limit. I’m having second thoughts now. Overall, I feel the Champions series is good – dare I say very good, though I know the hubris of saying that. My issue is I wanted it to be a bit more epic.
Nendor has three main continents – Ardus, Laudria & Erd. My goal was to make each book a journey that took the reader to each continent and back and than in Book 4 I’d wrap things up. The 100-120K word limit left me two choices: abandon the 4 book model in favor of more books or abandon the original series and try to create a new, scaled down story that would fit in the 4 book model.
Originally I decided to go with the former – preserve the overall story by breaking things into more, but shorter books. That sound great in theory, but the issue has been conflict, tension and keeping the readers attention. My original book 2 would have been about four times longer than the current book. With revisions and eliminating things that aren’t essential, The Eye And The Arm would probably be about three times longer – give or take 20-30 words. The first third set up the rest. Cutting it down to the first third didn’t make sense because it was all set up and no conflict/tension – or not enough to justify a book.
Re-writing the story required a major rewrite, I might as well have written a whole new book. That has been the labor of the last ten months. (Of course I also published Purpose, finished NaNoWriMo, wrote a couple other things when I needed a break, joined the Wednesday Brief Flashers group – oh yeah, and I got married and helped raise our daughter.)
The next step is to do a quick self-edit and send it to a few people who’ve agreed to read it and give me their honest opinion. Once I get that back, I’ll know where to go next.
In the meantime, I plan to work on another of the many projects I’ve been wanting to write. Stay tuned – details to follow. 🙂
This is my blog’s 200th post. I wish I had something stupendous to announce, or wildly entertaining. Instead I figured I’d use it to do what I had planned to do today all along – post an update. Boring? Perhaps, but I try to make it mildly interesting if I can.
When I started this site/blog, it was meant to promote my first book and the others that would hopefully follow. I had no idea what that really meant – even if at the time I thought I had it all figured out. In the 199 posts that preceded this one, I learned a few things that I hope will make the next 200 better.
I’ve almost finished Book Two of Champions – well the rough draft. I hope to have this finished by mid December and submit it and see what happens. Hopefully by next month’s update I’ll know for sure when I plan to submit it.
Right now it’s NaNoWriMo and I’m taking a stab at successfully doing it. I’m writing a story I’ve titled Harp Strings. This is a contemporary story so it’s a bit of a new genre for me. Although I wrote Second Shot and Bettor To Lose, neither of those were submitted for publication. This one will be – hopefully it will get picked up. I’ve posted the rough draft of the first chapter if anyone wants to take a peek and let me know their thoughts.
Also, because this is post 200 and I promised something mildly interesting, I’ve also posted the first chapter of two other stories I’ve started – typically if I have a new idea that needs to be written, I’ll take a break from what I’m doing and write as much as I can of the new story. Some get more than others. But here are two that I’ve started:
I’m quite sure how much to write about the plot – I don’t want to give too much away so I’d want to think about it a bit more before writing too much. The basis of this is there are Angels living among us and we don’t know. The story revolves around Nick Fenton who is not all that lucky at love. He blames part of it on having a totally hot best friend/roommate who always seems to be the center of attention. But things are never as they seem including Nick’s lack of a love life.
I’ll be honest, in some ways, this is the story I most want to write. But it is also another series and I really need to finish Champions before I start a new one. Dlgen get’s it name from the warriors graced by the gods with special talent. There are 5 levels of Dlgen, and I planned to have 5 books each one following Harlan as he progresses through the ranks.
Harlan is 18 when the book starts, his father – Telg is the only living Dlgen of the fifth order. Telg adopts Harlan after he comes upon Harlan being attacked by the other boys in his village. Harlan has been disowned by his family and cast out. But Telg saw something special in Harlan and claimed him as his own son.
Harlan is indeed special. The gods have chosen Harlan and Stefrem, a prince of Gillum, as the ones to protect the world from a return on an ancient evil. But first these two need to figure out that they don’t hate each other.
My plan is to finish NaNoWriMo and then finish Champions – book two. The rest of Champions is written – in rough draft form – so I hope to get all those books out in rapid succession after book two. Once that is over, I have to decide what to focus on next.
So here’s a quick Poll – what should I focus on after I finish The Eye And The Arm; Book Two of Champion of the Gods? Please vote and leave comments if you like.