Riven is Live!

I'm happy to announce that Riven, the next Reflections (Alec and Adri) book, is now live at all of the major retailers.

The Setup:

Adri is the happiest she's ever been, but a noose is slowly tightening around the entire pack. Alec's victory in Chicago put the shape shifter ruling body on notice that he was going to do everything he could to bring them down, but she knows that right now he needs time to secure allies, time that they are almost certainly not going to have.

Alec's power has grown to a level Adri never would have believed possible just a few months ago, but the Coun'hij has the perfect tool for killing him and destroying every structure in Sanctuary. All indications are that Puppeteer is stalking them with an army of bestial creatures who are immune to Alec's special ability.

Alec has taken his first step towards reestablishing the monarchy, with him as the king, and now that Adri is back in his life he seems to know who he wants to be his queen, if they manage to survive. Unfortunately Adri never realized becoming royalty was part of the bargain when they got back together.

You can find Riven at the following locations, and a print version is hopefully only a few weeks away:

iTunes

Amazon

Amazon UK

Barnes & Noble

Smashwords

Kobo

Sony, Diesel and others will follow as Riven makes it into the Smashwords premium catalogue.

As indicated previously, Riven will be on sale for $2.99 until the end of the week as a thank you to all of you, after which it will revert to its normal price of $3.99.

In other news, the fourth Guadel Chronicles book, Shattered Ties, will be released on September 1^st and it will be followed by another Eldon Murphy Reflections book featuring Geoffrey towards the end of this year.

As always, thank you for everything that you are doing to help spread the word and for coming along to see what happens on Adri and Alec's journey together.

Dean

An Ending

My favorite part of writing is seeing a story come together. It's almost like building something with blocks. You start out with an idea, but it isn't until you actually start building your structure that you realize all of the details that you didn't have quite right, that you hadn't thought through yet.

There's something incredibly magical about taking facets of a particular story and putting them together in ways that you didn't expect to when you started out. I'm constantly amazed at the way that things will just click into place almost without any help from me. Things that I put in without really thinking about them at the time turn out to be pivotal later on it the series.

That means that my writing process is a little bit of an exercise of faith each time. I always know at least a little bit of what needs to happen in a given book, but so much of it just happens during the course of actually sitting down to write.

Usually there are two big milestones to any book. The first is when I know how I want the book to end and the second is when I know how I'm going to get from wherever I am to that ending. Once I know those two things then finishing the book is mostly just a matter of putting in the time to get all of the words down on paper.

Last night I figured out how I'm going to end Alec and Adri's story. I don't know exactly how I'm going to get there still, but I know how the series is going to end; and that's incredibly liberating.

I sat down for half an hour or so last night when the idea first came to me and sketched out the essentials; who would be involved, what new characters need to be introduced before it could happen and some key changes that will need to take place in a couple of existing characters.

It wasn't until I finished getting that all down that I realized something else.

For most of the last twenty years I've had another story rattling around in the back of my head. It's a Wheel of Time style epic fantasy set in the same world as the Guadel Chronicles, and there are some overarching themes that I always planned on working into the story there. Oddly enough, the ending of the Reflections series will have some of the very same themes, just done in a different way.

I really wish I could tell you all more, but I'd probably better just leave it right there for now. I don't think this was just coincidence though. It feels a bit like I've got a story that I'm supposed to tell, and that it's determined to make sure that it's told regardless of anything else.

Riven Cover Reveal...sort of

Katie has finished the cover for Riven, but this time we've done things smart and we did the print cover from the start rather than starting with an e-book cover and then coming back later and redoing everything so that we could release a print version.

The trickiest part this time around has been trying to settle on an border that we felt like dealt with the transition between the left side of the girl's face and the spine of the book. I'm in the process of ordering print proofs for our final four versions, which will probably be what decides things for us, but I thought that all of you might want to see what we've got so far.

(Remember the printing process results in .125 inches being cut off from all four sides, so the border you see here will be half the size on the actual printed books.)

I think that Katie and I are leaning to #1 for the print version and the gold border from #3 for the e-book, but I'd love to hear what you think.

The blurb on this one may not be what I end up using when all is said and done, but it gives you a bit of a feel for what's in store :)

Dean

What to write next...

I wasn't anticipating that I'd make another post this month, but a question has come up for which I'd love to have input from all of you.

Apologies in advance, this post is a bit raw. I didn't ask Katie to edit it for me, so the odd typo or two might slip by me.

It's starting to feel to me like the book I write in May will be a Dark Reflections novel. There are some things coming up in the next few Reflections novels after Riven that need the storyline from Dark Reflections to be fully appreciated.

The artist in me is saying 'full speed ahead,' but the business person in me is a little nervous about writing this Dark Reflections novel.

I've only sold about 1/3rd as many copies of Trapped as of Forsaken over the last four months, so it would appear that people are much less interested in stories that aren't part of the central Alec and Adri arc.

Given that I need to write several standalone books that will focus primarily on Rachel, Jess, and Jasmin, I'm potentially setting myself up to do a lot of work that not very many people will be interested in reading (especially when you add in Geoffrey's books, which also haven't been as well received).

Being an indie writer means that I have to balance the art against the business, so I'm curious what you all think.  Would you be interested in a Dark Reflections novel where Alec and Adri don't know each other yet? Alec's dad is still alive, as is Adri's dad and sister and Alec and Adri don't know each other yet.

Please let me know what you think in the comments.

Thanks,

Dean

End of April Status Update

It's hard to believe that April is already nearly over. This month was a 'down' month for me meaning that I haven't written any new fiction. Instead my time has been spent editing and wrestling with books that needed put into paperback.

Honestly those are some of my least favorite parts about being an indie writer, so I'm trying to make sure that I don't let those activities take over all of my time. The plan this year is to spend alternate months writing and fill in with all of the other housekeeping chores that need done since I have such a backlog of housekeeping tasks. January was dedicated to Shattered Ties (Guadel #4) and March was spent writing the sequel to The Greater Darkness (this book doesn't have a name yet, although I'm thinking of something like 'Reflected Darkness'), so it's just about time to sit down and start up another book.

The bad news is that I'm not yet sure which thread of the overarching story to pick up next, but the good news is that I feel like I've managed to get quite a bit accomplished over the last little while:

New Fiction:
Riven is fully edited and I've gotten responses back from all of my beta readers. That means it just needs a cover and then I'll spend a couple of days getting everything formatted for the various e-book retailers.

Shattered Ties is with my editor, RJ Locksley, for the next round of major editing.

Trade Paperback:
The first three Guadel Chronicles books are now available in trade paperback.

I've reformatted Broken and Torn yet again (this makes 3-4 times for each of them), but now they just need a wraparound cover.

Splintered, Intrusion, Scent of Tears and Trapped are all fully laid out, so they just need revised covers and then I'll order physical proofs.

Forsaken is about 90% of the way done from an interior standpoint, so another few hours ought to see it to a point where it also just needs a cover before proofs can be ordered.

Lastly, I've done a bit of work on my blog that I hope will work as intended. I've added a 'coming soon' block on the right side so that it's easy to quickly find out when a given book is scheduled to be released. With any luck that should help make sure that you all get a chance to get new releases during the first week when the price will be slightly cheaper. I've also re-worked the list of my books that was previously on the right side of the blog. It's still on the right side, just below the 'coming soon' panel, but now the list has a single entry per book which links to a separate page for each title. It's a little cleaner than the way I had it before, but more importantly, I've put the books up in order by series. I've had a number of e-mails lately from people who weren't sure what order to read the books in, so hopefully this change will help make that a little clearer.

Between now and the end of the month I'm also hoping to upload revised versions of nearly all my books up to the various retailers. These new versions will fix some errata that I found in the course of prepping each book for trade paperback, but they will also be modified slightly so that the reading order of the series is more obvious.

I'm excited to get back to writing fiction in May and I'm extremely happy with how Riven has turned out. My beta readers have been even more excited than usual after reading Riven and I can't wait until all of the remaining details are squared away so that all of you can finally read it.

Thanks,

Dean

A Kind Review

Julia from over at At As You Wish Reviews put up a very generous review of Broken that I've been meaning to link to for months. It's worth checking out her blog, just based on the fact that she loved Broken so much we know that she's got pretty good taste :)

Here's a link to the review.

A Big Apology

A Big Apology!

I'd like to apologize to anyone that signed up for may mailing list over the last few weeks who was expecting some kind of e-mail telling them how to get their free copy of Torn and Thawed Fortunes, but who didn't get any kind of e-mail.

I used a tightly restricted (I'm the only one that can send messages to the group or see the e-mails of the people who've signed up) version group inside of Google Groups to administer my mailing list.

Months ago I started playing around with the idea of using the welcome message inside of Google Groups to provide people who signed up to the mailing list with a coupon code to Smashwords that would allow them to download free copies of both books in whatever format the preferred. I made a note to remind myself to fully test the functionality, but somewhere along the way I lost track of that part of my to-do list and I failed to make sure that the welcome message acted as I'd expected it to.

I've added an instruction page on my blog now explaining to people that they'll need to create/login to their Google Groups account to access the coupon code, but in the meantime I've sent out an e-mail to the entire mailing list providing them with the coupon codes.

Sorry for the mix-up and a big thanks to Kaniah for pointing out to me that the mailing list wasn't quite working as intended.

Hopefully I'll have another status update sometime this month once I've polished off a few other tasks.

Regards,

Dean