REVENGE OF THE TAKEN

COMING SOON FROM LIMITLESS PUBLISHING

Here it is - the cover for REVENGE OF THE TAKEN, the first book in my HUMBLE WALKER series and my first book with Limitless Publishing. Hats off to my publisher and the graphic artist for all their hard work in getting this one done. It came out great.

A great cover can really bring a concept to life, and this does it so well. It's amazing as a writer when something visual is stuck to your words. In this case the artwork captures the book in such a way that it makes me want to read the book, and I wrote it. We are still working hard to make sure the product under the cover is the best it can be. The official release date is within reach and I'm excited. Working with Limitless Publishing has been an awesome experience.

Cover Proof is Proof

It's always an exciting time when you have a book coming out. But for me the thing gets real when you start to see cover proofs coming down from the graphic designer. Today I saw the cover for REVENGE OF THE TAKEN the first book in my Humble Walker series. All I can say is wow...my publisher has really got a great graphic designer, and they worked tirelessly on this project. The end result is a cover even better than I dreamed it would be.

As I said, for me the cover is really the big step. It just seems to put a stamp on all the hard work you put into a story. The cover brings the book to life, it breaths oxygen into the words. It also makes me want to work that much harder to get the next project done so I can see another cover...and another cover...and another cover... In this case Humble Walker is slated to be a three book series, but one never knows how many it will really go. I leave that up to the will of God and the Universe.

I will be posting a link to the cover soon, and putting it up on my website. For now, it's back to work on edits for my next project.

One Book Two Book Three Book

In recent days I signed on with Limitless Publishing to publish my Humble Walker Series, a three book deal that will start with Revenge of The Taken. I'm really excited to be working with such dedicated professionals. We in the editing stages right now and things are going well.

I've already started working on the second book in the series, and since I've never written a series before I was not sure at first how it was going to play out. After doing some brainstorming and getting words on the page I can already see how the second and third books are going to play out. Well, a little bit.

I'm definitely not a storyboard writer. When I start a book with a basic concept, I almost never end up with what I thought I was going to. I suppose that's good and bad. I pretty much let my characters develop and take over the story as they go. I also hate to put myself inside a box and cap what possible insanity my brain might create.

In the case of a series though, you kind of have to follow a formula, so it's a new challenge. But as I've been getting into the process I've realized it can be fun to let your characters grow beyond the first book. And you can introduce new characters along the way to enhance the established ones. Very cool.

Either way, there is a lot to be excited about.

Social Writing

I admire my fellow writers. Some of them are really good at staying active in social media and keeping up on their blogs. I am not one of them. I tend to spend more time working on my novels and writing never perfected query letters then I do posting on Twitter, Facebook or writing something for this blog.

I guess I need to find more of a happy medium. I have managed to collect some 3800 Twitter followers, but I feel like I don't dedicate enough time to them all. I want to read all of their books and write reviews like they often suggest but I just can't seem to find the time. And I feel like it's not fair to pick and choose which ones deserve my attention. They all do. Where does one start?

So I've decided to make a more directed effort to spend a little more time doing the social media thing. I do admit to liking Twitter much more then Facebook, but I guess that's a personal preference thing. Most people seem to prefer Facebook.

Summer is the hardest time to write anyway. I find myself really forcing it. I'm in the middle of the final drafts of three different projects and still seeking a publisher for another project. So technically four projects are sucking up my time and I cannot focus on a single one. That's not a good sign, but it is reflective of the summer writing mind. I'd rather be outside on my bicycle then inside with a hot computer on my lap. So the trips into social media platforms should be a welcome change.

Either way, have fun in the sun, and maybe I'll see you in the social circles.

The Neglected Blog

I admit it, my blog here is neglected, but right now it's for a good reason. I've been writing, hard. I just have not had the chance to get here and throw down a post, because I've been trying to get my next eBook polished, and I've been trying to get my new WIP completed and ready for the cold weather query blitz. Oh, and I've started a totally new and different non-fiction project about my personal battles which many of you know about. Those of you who don't will...err...have to buy the book... :)

Of course, now that my WIP finally has an ending, it needs to be meticulously re-drafted. It's at 65k words now and that's pretty high for me for a just completed draft, I'm probably looking at close to 85k words which is about 10k above my usual cadence. It's a really fun book, I think it's my best work yet. But it might end up taking a back seat for a while so I can get my next eBook published. The problem there is that my free editor cannot do it, so I need another pair of editing eyes and I have to pay for it...ugh... I hate shelling out money but I hate even more trying to find a good editor. I know there are tons of great ones out there but some are so expensive. I know in most cases you get what you pay for.

My new non-fiction project is still in preliminary stages, I've written an outline but I need to read a few similar books to get some ideas on how to round it into shape. I've never attempted something so far removed from fiction, but so far it's been a smooth transition. Since I was a journalist for a long time it's not a real far stretch to write a memoir-type piece. It is basically like reporting on myself.

So I hope all my fellow writers are getting ready for query season, because I would not want it to be easy for me to snag that great agent. I like competition and...wait a second, what the hell am I saying? On second thought, none of you should send out queries, yeah that's it... in fact you should all stop writing and take up toothpick sculpture, try and go pro with that. I hear toothpick sculpture agents are wide open and seeking clients.

I hope all of you made it through Hurricane Irene unscathed. Here in Upstate NY we had a lot of rain and some heavy winds, we lost power for about 5-hours. But other than that we were okay. My friends down in NJ and NYC had it a bit worse, they had some serious floods and damage to property. So I hope all of you out there are safe and sound.

Re-Thinking the .99 cent eBook

I used to side with the folks who thought a .99-cent eBook was a bad idea. I used to think we as writers were selling out, selling our hard work short and giving it away. But over the past few months I've slowly started changing my tune.

When I first released The Sweet Sixteenth back in April, I wanted to put it for sale for .99-cents, but after a conversation with a real published author, I decided against it. I learned that real authors were basically pissed off at the .99-cent eBook by independent authors because they were hurting their own sales and dragging down the level of pricing for eBooks in general. I saw that opinion echoed in several websites so I decided against making my book a .99-cent choice.

Now here were are only a few months later, and some of those very authors who were against it, are now doing it. I don't know what happened exactly, maybe it was the old "If I can't beat them join them" reason, I don't know.

I do agree that perhaps you should not debut an eBook at .99-cents, because then you leave no room to drop the price later. My plan was to drop the price of my first book, when my second eBook was out, which should be soon. But I've decided to drop the price right now, for several reasons, not the least of which is that the facts show that .99-cent eBook outsell their $2.99 counterparts by a score of 2-to-1. You make less per book, but you sell more books at the lower prices so it's something each author has to decide with each book.

The other reason is that so many authors are doing it, there is no point in taking some sort of stand anymore, to preserve some level of expected compensation for intellectual property. It is what it is, we are in a crazy time with these eBooks and the learning curves are very fluid and twisting all over the place. Everyone is making up their own rules as they go along and there is nothing wrong with that. And since no one is following any of the traditional rules, or even most of the new ones we are making up as we go along, I guess we can just pretty much do what we want and hope for the best. So in a sense, the only rule... there are no rules.

Writing Can Be Fun

Writing can be fun; we all know it or we would not be doing it. But it can also be about as pleasurable as sticking a No.2 pencil in your ear until it bumps into the gray matter inside your skull.

I think the creation part is what is fun, creating worlds, fleshing out characters, pouring your emotions and thoughts onto the page, that’s the fun stuff. But then when all that is done, the real work starts. Maybe someday I will be like those famous writers who just come up with the idea and pawn the hard work off on someone else. Of course, doing that is the easy way out.

After the experience of putting The Sweet Sixteenth on sale as an eBook, I decided that I wanted to do it again. So I put my current WIP on hold and went back to a story I finished last year. After rereading it, I decided it needed a rewrite if I was going to actually put it out into the world. It was a good story, but I had a couple agents tell me it was just too dark. Was it too dark, or, was I just presenting it that way? It is a dark concept, but it’s really not a dark story. Certainly it has dark moments. Either way I could see it needed something, and none of my beta readers could really help.

I was not sure what to do with the story; it was too good to go into the scrap heap, so I did the un-fun thing. I rewrote the entire story and put in the paranormal twist I wanted to in the beginning. I resisted the urge because at the time the concept did not seem to fall into place, it seemed like a paranormal twist was secondary to the story. Then during the first rewrite a new twist came to me and everything fell into place.

The problem is that the rewrite that was supposed to take a couple weeks has turned into a couple months and growing. Sculpting all those old storylines to fit a new twist can be maddening. Nevertheless, I could take any short cuts. The new rewrite was so significant the title no longer even worked, so that was another obstacle to tackle. I’m not really good at titles, if I had to do it all over again I’d probably change the title of almost everything I’ve written over the years.

So now, Revenge of The Taken is almost ready for it’s eBook journey. My point to this ramble is that the hard work part of writing, can sometimes lead back to the fun part of writing. It has been a lot of run doing what I thought was going to be a hassle. If I never put in the hours on this story, and plunged through the hard part, it would have never gotten to this point and I might have given up on it altogether.

Writing can be fun, but also hard work; when the two come together it really illustrates why we all keep doing it.