It's been a hectic three and a half weeks since my last
post, so I've got a few things to update everyone on. First, I've finished the rough draft of the
third book in the Guadel Chronicles. So
far it weighs in at a little over 73,000 words.
By comparison Broken was nearly 128,000 words, Torn was about 89,000
words, Frozen Prospects was just under 65,000 and Thawed Fortunes is a tad over
75,000 words. If you disregard about
5,000 words which I wrote months ago before I got busy with all of the audio
book work, I wrote this most recent book over 17 working days across 21
calendar days.
I do outline before I pick up a book, but I never know
exactly how all of the pieces are going to play out when I start so it's always
a little bit of a leap of faith every time I start a new book. We'll see what I think when I go back and
start through my editing passes on Guadel #3, but so far I'm reasonably happy, with
how everything turned out, and I've worked through a couple of points in my
head that were outstanding question marks as far as how I was going to go about
doing book #4. For now I've set Guadel
#3 aside; I'll need a month or so of space before I can go back and have a hope
of being objective when I start editing.
Last week I finished reading through 'Lone Wolf' for the
first time since I finished up the rough draft.
It weighs in at a tad over 50,000 words (I think Splintered was about
40,000 words if I remember correctly), so it's a relatively quick read, but I'm
likewise happy with how it turned out overall up to this point. I think I probably will end up adding in at
least one more scene before all is said and done. It would give me a way to demonstrate a
little more of my female lead's strength and would mix the settings up a
little, but I'll need to think it over a little bit before I open the
manuscript back up and start making changes to it. It always seems like those types of changes
are some of the most challenging to write because you have to make sure that as
you transition to the new scene that you don't lose anything else that you
needed and that you don't duplicate something that you've already got in there. As you can tell, I'm on the fence a little
bit, so in the end I'll probably just wait to see what Katie thinks before I go
and make changes.
My 'other' Reflections novel is still out to editing, to be
followed by beta readers and then by another round of proofing, but I've pretty
much decided to release this one under a pen name. I'm not going to keep it a secret from you
guys here on this blog, but this one is a bit darker than the other stuff that
I've done in the Reflections world so far and I don't want it to catch anyone
by surprise. I guess I'd say Reflections
so far has been PG-13 lite, while this other book is PG-13 still but on the
heavier end of the scale. I'll keep you
all posted as it gets closer to a release date so that you can each decide
whether or not you're interested in reading it.
It won't feature Alec or Adri, instead introducing a number of new
characters, one of which will make a brief appearance in the next Alec and Adri
book (big hint, the character in question is a pretty central individual as far
as some of the later novels go, but I'd better not say anything else because
I'm not quite sure still how quickly I'll develop this character).
I lost a hard drive in my desktop a few days before I
finished up Guadel #3, which was incredibly frustrating in that it means that
I'm working on my laptop instead (much, much, slower), but I was able to avoid
being forced to entirely stop working because I use
Dropbox and
SugarSync to
keep my files synched across multiple devices and backed up in 'the
cloud'. Katie always tells me that I
have more computer problems than anyone else she knows, which I don't think is
entirely fair, but I have to say that this round of problems has, so far, been
much less painful than the preceding rounds.
At the risk of veering too far off of topic, some of you may want to
check one or both of the two programs above out. They both provide several gigs of free
storage and then as you need more than that you can upgrade to a paid
account. Full disclosure, if you sign up
through the links above I'll get some free storage (I don't really need it as
things stand right now, but now that I'm writing full time and getting into
alternate channels and formats, you never know how fast I'll start filling up
my hard drive.) I'll do another post in
a day or two around how I've got my backups setup so those of you that aren't
interested can just skip over it.
Did my announcement that True Believer was live in the
headline keep you reading until now? I
didn't actually set out to write the post that way, but all of the other things
that have been happening just kind of bubbled up to the top of the post. Without further ado, True Believer is now
live.
Here's the
Setup:
Thrust into
a supernatural world populated by shape shifters, werewolves, and even darker
things, Adam no longer knows who he can trust.
Alec Graves
saved his life and thereby earned his service, but Adam continues to worry that
Alec is no better than the things he claims to be fighting.
Adam’s been
assigned his next job. Alec claims that
the target is a ruthless group of vampires, but Adam isn’t so sure such a thing
really exists. He’s either about to gun
down a bunch of innocents or walk alone into the home turf of a group of
creatures that could easily rip him in half.
Neither option seems
particularly smart, but Adam’s not entirely sure Alec’s minions are going to
let him pass on this assignment.
True Believer is another Dark Reflections short story and
you can currently get it on:
Amazon US
Amazon UK
B&N
Smashwords
Still to come will be Apple, Kobo, Sony and Diesel. I'm still planning on going direct to Kobo
and Apple at some point in the near future, but my understanding is that going
direct to Kobo isn't going to work very well for short stories, and I'll need
to have an Apple computer to go direct to Apple. I'm working on that last bit, but it's
probably going to take a while before that happens. I'll definitely be pushing to check that off
though before I put up Guadel #3 and the next Alec and Adri story.
