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It’s taken some time to get my head wrapped around the things that I need to do. You might have noticed that since my last post was April of last year!

Sometimes life just throws too many changes at you at once and things you love to do get pushed aside. For me, what was pushed aside was my writing.

I have been working on it, just not at a pace that was conducive to success. It was more at a pace that allowed me to keep it on the back burner while life sorted out all the other little and big things going on around me.

But in the end, the plan remains unchanged. I am going to keep writing with the intention of getting a publishing deal OR self publishing.

Because of the hectic pace of life this past year, I have focused on my short story projects. Specifically The Yoke and The Flames. Also, my two short stories that are prequels to my Daughters of Fate project have received a bit of attention.

The Daughters of Fate project is still moving forward and I do still plan to publish bits and pieces of it online as they come out in a workable draft. Right now, chapters 1 through 4 are the focus. Draft of draft is about 50% done.

The Yoke is about as good as I can make it. It is preparing for submission to a major writing competition this first quarter of 2016. The Flames will be a second quarter submission. By that time I hope to have the first four chapters of Daughters of Fate up for everyone who has been patiently waiting.

Outsider has made quite a bit of progress as well, and is coming along.

Under the Darkened Moon is still out there and I am preparing some new queries for it. It may get another “Final” edit, and if there are no takers it will be up on Amazon in the next year or two.

So that’s where everything stands. Hope the new year is treating you all with luck and joy. I’ll be talking to you soon!

Under the Darkened Moon once had a character named Kal.  Kal, alas, is no more.  Oh, he still exists in the story, but he is no longer called Kal.  His new name in the final manuscript is Tarek.

Why did I change his name?  Ultimately it was because too many characters had names starting with the letter K.  Kyel and Kath were enough, so I changed Kal to something else.

The decision was made easier during the live read edit when my wife was reading the story.  She has this particular drawl to her speech where she constantly replaces the “a” sound in words with an “e” and visa versa.  She also does the same thing with the “e”s to “i”s for some reason.  But she only does it on certain words.  For example, pen is pin, but ten is not tin.  She never pronounced one of the characters, called Den, as Din. (more…)

Yesterday, something wonderful happened.  I completed the manuscript for Under the Darkened Moon.

It’s been a wonderful journey, considering that it is the first novel I have been able to completed in darn near twenty years of attempting to write a novel.  I’ve gone through a whole range of emotions from joy (at having done it), to sorrow (at realizing my characters, my children, are all grown up), to fear (at realizing that now the hard part begins as I search for an agent and publisher).

The whole experience of writing this story began last year on July 18th and has spanned, officially, 517 days (44,668,800 seconds) of my life. It’s hard to believe, but I’ve spent over 2,000 hours either directly working on this story or thinking about it.  That’s a lot of time.
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It’s a sad reality, but the amount of time available for writing is inversely proportional to the amount of time actually needed for writing. This is especially true with the Christmas Season now upon us.

I had four days off for Thanksgiving and spent all four running around with family (3 days) and then doing all the errands that running around forced me to reschedule (1 day).  In the end, I managed to do about as much editing in those four days as one typical day.
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Yes, editing on Under the Darkened Moon is continuing.  Although it is going slowly.  Seems that I have been out of my routine lately.  Usually I spend an hour in the evening running a chapter or so through the Text to Speech software to see how they sound.  But lately that simply has not been happening.  I have been prepping chapters, but they are not getting their final manuscript treatment at the speed with which they are prepared.

Plus I am doing a final comb through of the manuscript in several sweeps looking for unnecessary instances of the following words: (more…)

I see a lot of authors (generally those who are self-publishing) dismiss bad reviews of their books.  Google the topic and there is no end to the number of budding authors explaining why they don’t care if someone gives their book a bad review.  Or, even worse, why they don’t even read what other people say about their book.

Well, I say that’s a bad attitude.  I think it is a dangerous stance to take where you choose to shelter yourself from criticism.  This is especially true, I believe, for indy, self-published authors.  I think you SHOULD care about bad reviews.

Look, unless you are Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, and going to sell books no matter what you write, then not caring about criticism only hurts you.  Face it, only once you are at a point in your career where you actually don’t have to worry about the critics, because you’ve proven yourself as someone who knows how to write and sell books, should you even remotely consider no longer worrying about the critics.  Frankly, most my fellow authors out there whom I have seen state they don’t care about their critics are not at this point in their careers yet.  In fact, most of them are FAR, FAR, FAR from that point. (more…)

Every day I get asked the same question, “Why are you still editing that novel of yours?”

I don’t think the answer is that complicated.  I simply want to produce a quality story in the end.  And, while I and others who have read Under the Darkened Moon think that the story is good, I personally don’t think it is good enough quite yet.  Although, I do think it is quickly getting there.

For me, there is no rush.  I’ve been writing off and on for over twenty years.  My very first novel, which I started back in high school, had three years invested into it and never got even half way done.  For Under the Darkened Moon, I opened the file (started writing the story) on June 18th of last year.  It is now October, nearly November a year later.  I could have pushed this work out there six months ago, at least according to some opinions, but certainly not my own.   As one person in my review group said, “It’s already better than 95% of what is self-published on Amazon and other sites like that.” (more…)

As I’ve blogged about several times, getting Chapter 9 for my work in progress (Under the Darkened Moon) ready for the manuscript has been a real struggle. The problem is that the chapter is one of those necessary bridges to get Kyel, the story’s main character, from point A to point B. Point A is Chapter 8. Point B is Chapter 10.

Alas, the scene has been really fighting me. (more…)

Last night was an epic struggle between myself, and what quickly seems to be becoming my nemisis.  Yes, chapter 9 seems to be becoming quite the little nuscience for me.

After an hour long struggle, two nearly full rewrites, and what almost escalated to an armed standoff, Under the Darkened Mono’s chapter nine has been reborn cet again.
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Preparing chapter 9 for the manuscript last night was absolutely brutal. I feel like the chapter literally kicked my ass.

There were so many things that simply did not sound right once I let the TTS start reading it back to me.  And here I thought I had done a good job with it during FINAL edits. Boy was I wrong.
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