Hey everyone! I’d first like to thank all of you folks who took the time to comment last week about what project you’d like to see me tackle once the Rune Breaker holiday thing is in the can.
The general consensus seems to be WRITE ALL THE THINGS, but also ‘So I Married a Supervillain’ is the strongest contender, so that get priority.
As I am STILL doing my NaNo, I’m going to be brief this week, but I want to let you guys know how things are going. Oh, and also, for those of you who are partaking, we can totally be NaNo friends over on the official site. That link goes right to my profile.
So How’s NaNo Going, Vaal?
Well. Let’s start with accomplishments: Soul Battery is done. The last chapters (some 7k words) were my first goal for NaNo this year. I’ll talk more about it further down. At the same time, I’m on point with the Wintercoming story.
…And yes, it sounds like the Game of Thrones thing. I’m not sure I’ve said it here, but… I am not a fan of Game of Thrones or the books it sprang from—people who have been here a while can guess why. So why is ‘Wintercoming’ even a thing in one of my works? Because I made up the holiday somewhere around 2003. This is kind of like how I started saying ‘shiny’ for cool, the Firefly came out with ‘shiny’ for good. Except Firefly give birth to a resurgence in Dark Fantasy, thus earning my eternal ire.
Amusingly, GRRM’s Winter is coming is referring to some zombie apocalypse thing while Wintercoming is sort of Super Thanksgiving. It’s the day the druid stop protecting Chordin’s outlying farms from the natural consequences of being above the arctic circle for three months and the farmers are forced to go live in the city/head to other towns further south. Traditionally, this means your distant relatives come calling, which I guess could be like a zombie apocalypse.
But I’m getting far afield here. Back to NaNo.
So like every year, I have to pretend to be an iron man (not the Iron Man) and not count my regular writing for the site toward my NaNo number. This… is very, very stupid of me. How stupid? So far this month, I’ve written 10,000 of 50,000 in my NaNo… and 12,000 that DO NOT COUNT. Oh, and I’m going to be writing 3-4,000 more that don’t count tomorrow.
Also, Christmas is the time of the year when a self-pub author damn well better have new books up for sale because December’s sales are going to be your best. Last year, I had to finish 15,000 words of Evil Unto Evil in November, format it and promote it. Is it any wonder why I didn’t win last year?
This year, well this week, I had a LOT of work to do. Formatting Soul Battery, re-formatting the Complete Volume 1 (By the way, the character bios are now in it. I’ve been uploading the new file all day), formatting Strange Days, AND Rise of Morganna. I… didn’t get a lot of writing done this week that wasn’t my weekly stuff. That’s done for now though and I swear by these destroyed wrists I’ll be back in action soon.
Another small note… some of you who follow me on Twitter might already have seen this, but Liedecker: Life and Times III #5 is really, REALLY sad. I’ve made myself smile with my writing, I’ve made myself uncomfortable… but this is the first time I felt like crying. I think I really need to write some SiMaS anyway to make myself feel better after that. So you have that to look forward to in January :p
Okay, So You’re Failing At Writing Even Though That’s Literally Your Job…
Hey!
Whatever. Tell Us Some Good News, Write-Monkey
I resemble that write-monkey remark, jerk. God, I hate rhetorical audience surrogates.
But yes, anyway: Soul Battery
Soul Battery: Children of Agmar (Rune Breaker, #5 is Amazon ever asks you) is complete and I’ve seen emails out to the Street Team so it will be edited and ready to go in December.
What’s it about?
The story starts a year after Rune Breaker, with Pele and Ru still with the Winter Willow. Pele is content with her new family life and the life of travel it afford her. That is right up until Grandmother books the entire clan on an airship flight to Harpsfell, not knowing about Pele’s awful past aboard airships.
Pele struggles to deal with this through various means including throwing herself into family stuff and hanging out with Brin, but her way of coping is less than healthy and leads to a running conflict for the series. Meanwhile, a new character appears who might be able to help her if he can put aside his own goals and prejudices… Vul Azan—Pele’s half brother via the red dragon Agmar! That is, he might be able to help if the assassin sent to kill him doesn’t get to him first!
It was a lot of fun to write and finally let me bring Harpsfell into the Ere books, which is my crown jewel of worldbuilding: a dungeonpunk cosmopolitan city with all the trappings you’d expect. If you’re a fan of the Ere setting, you really, really want to pick up this book because we get to go to a lot of places that Rune Breaker only mentioned. We were in the east for the first series, now we’re headed west; from Callen, the nations of warrior tribes where might makes right, to the frozen land of Chordin where only the grace of the druids makes life possible.
This is Ere the way I always wanted to turn it loose. Rune Breaker’s locales served to ease fantasy fans into the setting while Soul Battery gets to build on that and go full throttle.
I hope you’ll like it to.
Street Team members, you have emails waiting and in one case, a copy of the book. IF you’d like to be part of the Street Team and get in on stuff like this, check out this post.
That’s all for this week. It’s back to the word mines for me.
