A Name for the Space Adventure

I can't believe it's nearly time for this release, but I'm so excited to finally be sharing this adventure with you. Kira's story has been in my head in one form or another since I was twelve. When we were younger, my sister used to beg me to finish this story. She'd read the first few chapters  (admittedly not well written since I was twelve) and something about the characters had captured her imagination. A good thing too, since they'd done the same to me.

Despite that, the story never felt ready to be written. Then came Wayfarer's Keep and suddenly the characters in Kira's universe could no longer be silenced. I'd originally planned this to be my passion project -- something I tinkered with on the weekends while my weeks remained devoted to my main projects. Of course, my books have a tendency of taking over and after Dawn's Envoy, I knew I couldn't keep this one on the back burner any longer. 

I'm so glad at  least a piece of this story will soon be out there and no longer running amok in my dreams.

 Before you ask, this is planned to be at least a three book series. Knowing me that will probably spiral into five or six. I can't help it. Once I get into a world I have to explore all the hidden crevasses and side characters. 

I sincerely hope you enjoy this new world. It's near and dear to my heart. 

Happy Reading.

Rules of Redemption

The war everyone thought was over is just beginning.

Kira Forrest is a survivor. She’s risen above the pain of her beginnings to become a war hero only to leave it all behind in the pursuit of a simple life. Now a salvager, she makes a living sifting through the wreckage of dead alien ships from a war that nearly brought humanity to its knees.

After her ship takes damage, she’s forced to re-route to a space station where her past and present collide with dangerous consequences.

Kira’s existence holds the key to a faltering peace treaty with the Tuann—a technologically advanced alien race who dislikes and distrusts all humans. Winning her freedom should be easy, but a powerful and relentless Tuann warrior stands in her way. Deceiving him seems impossible, especially when he strays dangerously close to secrets she struggles to hide.

Can Kira reconcile the pain of her past with the possibilities of her future? The fate of two races depends on her success.

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Excerpt

The Nature of Sequels

Writing a sequel, I've come to discover, is different than writing the first book in a world. I felt that way when I wrote the sequel to Shadow's Messenger, and I'm feeling it even more with the sequel to Dragon-Ridden.

With a first book, everything is new. Every detail you make up, every character you name, every cool idea you insert into the story. With a sequel, you have an established history. Names and character descriptions have to stay the same from book to book. No changing a blonde to a brunette. No giving a character a back story that completely contradicts what happened in the last book. It can be maddening trying to remember everything.

To get around this problem, I've made extensive note cards filled with character descriptions, place descriptions and major themes or plot points from the first book. It helps, but there's always something missing from my notes. Often I find myself forgetting a character's name and having to insert xxx as a place holder so I don't slow the rate of writing. This works, but occasionally I have so many xxx in a chapter that the characters run together and I have to untangle the threads during edits. 

The more difficult problem, aside from keeping characters and places consistent across books, is giving the world context in the sequel. How do you get across all of the major details of the world without providing your reader with an info dump or a complete rehash of what happened in the last book? Additionally, the writer needs to layer on those details to create an even more complex and rich world with every book they write in the series.

Dragon-Ridden's sequel feels infinitely more difficult to do this with than Shadow's Messenger's sequel. Maybe because I had to create everything in that world whereas Aileen's world takes place in modern day Columbus. Or maybe it's because it's been so long since I worked in Tate's world that its taking me a moment to get back into the rhythm of it. Either way, I've managed to get several pages of words down this weekend. I'm happy to say I officially have a beginning. Though I have no idea how much of that beginning will make it to final edits.

House Keeping Items

I’ve recently started receiving questions about the status of various sequels, which is something I love getting asked about. It means that someone out there is enjoying the worlds I created enough to want to spend more of their precious time reading about these characters. That's an awesome feeling. I could do that all day, but to make things a little easier I thought I’d answer the question in a place everyone can read it.

The good news is I plan sequels for both Dragon-Ridden and Pathfinder’s Way. The bad news is this may take time as I have two books in a separate series scheduled next. The first, Shadow’s Messenger, is already written and will be released in fall of this year. Its sequel will be released early 2017. From there, I plan to write the sequel to Pathfinder’s Way and after that the sequel to Dragon-Ridden. The sequels may change places based on reader responses, but for now this is the plan I'm going with.

It may seem strange that I’ve decided to go with another series before revisiting my two previous ones, but I feel that Shadow’s Messenger is a very strong book. Quite frankly, the characters in that book shouted loudly enough that they drowned out both Tate and Shea’s voices, making it almost impossible to move forward with their stories.

I’ve found I can only push my creativity so far, and while I probably could write one of the sequels first, I do not think the books would be as strong as if I had waited for the characters to start speaking to me again. Because I write in part based on that inspiration, that means this schedule may change depending on if another book shouts loudest. I am going to try to stick to this schedule though.

Once the cover from Shadow’s Messenger comes back, I will post the synopsis and an excerpt here on the blog so make sure you check back.

 I hope this sheds some light on any questions you may have. As always, feel free to contact me through one of the various platforms I’m on or email me. I will be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Happy reading.

Break's over - time to work

Since getting Pathfinder's Way off to the editor and finishing the first draft of my new unnamed book, I decided to give myself a mini break from the writing. It was supposed to be two weeks where I relaxed, caught up with friends, read a couple of books and basically did all the things I haven't been doing while planted in front of a laptop for the last few months.

Turns out, I kind of suck at relaxing. In the last two weeks, I've cleaned my house top to bottom, caught up on all the laundry and had a massive cooking day where I made three different types of recipes that netted me about 20 individual meals I could store in the freezer for lunches. Because that wasn't active enough, I also ended up painting my bedroom and bathroom. I'm happy with them, but my time wasn't spent relaxing as I'd imagined. Sometimes when I am really busy for awhile, I get stuck in busy mode and can find it hard to relax.

Today, I started in on the second draft of my current project. So far, it doesn't seem as difficult an edit as the last one, and I'm hopeful the process goes a bit smoother than previous ones.

Welcome To The New Year

I can't believe it, but 2016 is here and has been for ten days.Where did the last year go? Somehow it sped past and was gone before I realized it. To be fair, last year was incredibly busy on both the personal and writing front.  I had a lot to be grateful for last year. The biggest accomplishment on the writing side is that I finished not one, but two books (I finished the second book's first draft on Christmas Day).

Right now I'm in the process of putting final touches to the first before sending to a copy editor. I forgot how much extra work is involved when readying a book for publishing. After sending to the editor, I'll need to make any changes they suggest, then either design a cover or reach out to a graphic designer to do that part for me.

The part I hate the most, though, is drafting the blurb for the book. It's one of those jobs I would love to farm out to someone because I'm never quite satisfied with what I create. What it is about coming up with two to three paragraphs that creates such frustration, I don't know. Especially when I just got finished writing a full length novel. It's the part I dread the most. At this point I've rewritten this blurb at least four times. I'm still not happy with it :-|.

Sigh, time to stop whining and take another crack at it. Hopefully, I'll finish that part today.

Christmas is near o_o

It's the week of Christmas, and I am not ready. Not at all. My house is a disaster area. My decorations aren't up yet. My Christmas shopping is only half done. Usually, I'm a little more prepared than this but this month has been hectic and the holidays have managed to creep up on me faster than expected.

For instance, last week I was in Colorado partly for work and partly for pleasure. As a result, I lost a week to the madness. I managed to get some presents while there so it wasn't a complete bust in terms of Xmas preparation. As a side note: Denver is awesome. We went to the Denver Festivus, a beer festival, in an old hangar which doubled as a museum. They had all local beers and even I, who usually doesn't care for beer, found a few I like. We also went hiking at Red Rocks which has an amphitheater built into the side of the the rocks. Pictures are below if you're interested.

Now though, Christmas with all the impending madness is around the corner and I am slightly freaking out. In addition to the usual amount of family, I have friends in town so I will be pretty busy. This is both good and bad. Good because I get to hang out with some people I rarely see anymore. Bad because I am so close to being done with this book that I can practically taste it, and I just can't physically find the time to write the ending. Grr. I just need two days of steady writing time. Two! I think I could finish if I had just that much time, but I have so many impending plans that I don't know if  I'll swing it.

Wish me luck. For now, enjoy the photos while I try to carve some writing time into my schedule.

The end is near...

Of the current book I'm writing, anyway. I'm entering the end game and gearing up for the final confrontation between my characters. It's gets my adrenaline going to be this close, but at the same time I still have several weeks of writing left.

I'm about three quarters of the way through and have officially entered the stage of just wanting to be done. My brain is so fried that I don't even care whether what I'm writing makes sense. At this point, I've promised myself that all flaws and bad sentences will be caught and polished away in the editing and re-writing phase. All I can think is 'the end is in sight. Must get there as fast as possible before my brain deflates.'

So to give my brain a break and also entertain others, here is a photo of my cat. She's found a new toy. It's called tissue paper.

Enjoy.

To my frustration, I've discovered that taking a good photo of a black cat inside is nearly impossible. Her fur makes all her features just blend together until all you can see is a blob. I refuse to give up though, hence the photo :-|