Category: Fantasy

State of the Author, 4Q2024

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-First off, I think my books are all in Kindle Unlimited now, free to anyone with a subscription to KU. If you see any sign that they are not in KU, please let me know in the comments.

–Undead Flight (Hunter Healer King Book 2) is now in the hands of my proofreaders. Barring complications, should be ready to publish by Christmas time. Ebook cover is done; blurb is done with AI help (stay tuned, my post on the blurbing process will be out tomorrow. Print cover is dependent on my final cleanup of the manuscript to determine page length.

-Also started Hunter Healer King Book 3 by writing a fairly dark and distressing scene from the last third of the book. This is kind of suboptimal, because stitching together scenes written out of order tends to add (wo)manhours to the first draft process, but I hadn’t figured out the opening scene at that point. I don’t know when it will be released but I know that I am aiming for Christmas of 2025.

-I have had a sci-fi Pride and Prejudice retelling in development for a long time; finally got the first scene down. No projected completion date at this time. My main inspiration for this concept was, weirdly enough, Star Wars: A New Hope. If you dig deep enough into the filmographies of the supporting cast, you will find one with a Pride and Prejudice connection in his earlier career. Regrettably, the catchy working title explicitly references Star Wars, so the official title will probably be something rather sedate of the “Pride and…” format.

-New ebook covers using AI art for Shadow Captain and Spider Star are done; still need to do new paperback covers for them, and ebook/hardcover for the 2 in 1 volume for the duology. Projected release date for the 2 in 1 is first/second quarter of 2025.

-Early stages of AI art covers for the Jaiya Series and Ancestors of Jaiya series. No text layout yet. A four in one of Ancestors might come out in third quarter of 2025; a seven in one of the full metaseries might be sometime in 2026 but a lot could go sideways between now and then.

Sequel to Wolf’s Trail Is Done!

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A hair over 56K words, so a bit longer than Wolf’s Trail itself. What’s next? Well, I’m going to take a break from this universe for a week or so, try to work on getting my older stuff into Kindle Unlimited, and other “administrative” writing related work, and then try to get back to work on the novel in maybe second week of November, – cleanup, breaking into chapters, submission to the people who early-read and edit for me. I hope to have it out by the end of the year, but no guarantees.

Let’s throw in a somewhat triumphant sounding Bollywood video while we’re at it:

Rings of Power: Impressions of ep 208 and the Series to Date

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Okay, let’s get the big important news out of the way: the official renewal of the series for season 3 is expected any day now, the show runners have pretty strongly shot down the suggestion that the Dark Wizard of Rhun (Ciaran Hinds’s character) is Saruman, and the writer’s room for season 3 is acquiring writers from The Crown and Coronation Street. The first is welcome news to anyone with half a brain, because it makes no sense for Saruman – who in LOTR had been seen for a long time as a helpful but perhaps flawed ally – to be Obviously Evil when Gandalf first encounters him. The second is promising news because one of the show’s most crippling weaknesses in these first two seasons was the writers’ inability to mimic Britspeak, especially the dignified idiom Tolkien used for the Elves and Dunedain. I hope the new writers help with that.

Anyway, on with the usual disjointed thoughts and spoilers for all kinds of things:

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Rings of Power: Impressions of Episode 207

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Probably the best or second-best episode of the season, with the main defects being a couple of mildly bad turns of phrase(1) and some weird plot contrivances going around Galadriel. Keep in mind, though, that the middle of season 1 of this show really lowered the bar for all the other episodes before and since, so “best/second-best episode of the less flawed of the two seasons of Rings of Power made to date” is not the biggest compliment ever.

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Rings of Power: Impressions of Ep 206

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*Waggles hand* Meh. About on par with the last one, maybe a shade less good. Charlie Vickers groupies and the idiots who think Middle Earth is all about the fight scenes might grade it more generously than I do. In other news, my cowatchers and I have been rewatching (and for the most part enjoying) the extended editions of the LOTR movies, and I may put up a post about that at some point in the near future. The main relevant points for now are that watching ROP and LOTR side by side a). really underlines how much better Jackson/Walsh/Boyens were at simulating Tolkienesque dialogue than the ROP team, and b). how much ROP unnecessarily remixes bits from the movies, especially bits that were so inane that I recognized them at the time I saw the originals in the LOTR rewatch but they’ve fallen out of my head by now.

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State of the Author, Late 2024

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The sequel to Wolf’s Trail is in the late stages of drafting – about 48K with maybe a couple thousand more words to go. Just moving very slowly because I’ve been sick with some respiratory thing for over a month and a half at this point. Starting to do better, which means the creative brain(1) is starting to come back online. With some luck, I should be done by the end of September, take some time off to work on other stuff in October, polish it in November, release by the end of December (around the same time the first book did last year).

(1) as opposed to the critical brain, which you’ve seen a lot of lately with the Jane Austen adaptation posts and the Rings of Power posts