My own country celebrated its Independence Day this week, so I thought I’d publish a couple of excerpts (one today, one yesterday, one the day before yesterday) from the opening chapter of my novel Scapegoating a Hero, which deals in part with the fictional country of Jaiya gaining its independence.
Continue reading “The Independence of Jaiya: Rijal’s Work, Part 2”Category: Jaiya
The Independence of Jaiya: Rijal’s Work, Part 1
My own country celebrated its Independence Day this week, so I thought I’d publish a couple of excerpts (one yesterday, one today, one tomorrow) from the opening chapter of my novel Scapegoating a Hero, which deals in part with the fictional country of Jaiya gaining its independence.
Continue reading “The Independence of Jaiya: Rijal’s Work, Part 1”The Independence of Jaiya: Anora’s Work
My own country celebrated its Independence Day this week, so I thought I’d publish a couple of excerpts (one today, one tomorrow, one Saturday) from the opening chapter of my novel Scapegoating a Hero, which deals in part with the fictional country of Jaiya gaining its independence.
Continue reading “The Independence of Jaiya: Anora’s Work”Weird Wednesday: Smashwords Sale
Weird Wednesday: Audiobooks!
Thanks to the auto-narrator function at Google Play, I now have audio book versions of four of my novels available:
Shadow Captain
Marrying a Monster
Waking the Dreamlost
Loving a Deathseer
Right now I am working on polishing Shadow Captain’s sequel. I hope to have it published by late December of this year, at which point it will spend 90 days in Kindle Unlimited so that the KU readers of the first book can enjoy it. The audiobook for the sequel will be made available around the time it comes to Google Play, sometime in 2023. Once I have Shadow Captain’s sequel completed, the focus will be on re-editing the Ancestors of Jaiya novels in preparation for their audiobook release, and on a new project to be announced later.
Happy Listening!
Where Did THAT Come From: Essem and Co, Ularti
Ularti, the owner of the tramp freighter Vanner, keeps Jetay and Khed in indentured servitude, and is one of the main antagonists in Shadow Captain. Jetay’s story arc, as previously told is that of the drifter Drafted Into a Good Cause, and frequently in that arc, there’s a character who the drifter used to work with, who represents the pull away from the Good Cause. I didn’t have a good sense of what that might be in this case, until I hit on the “Hansel and Gretel” framing for Jetay’s situation.
Continue reading “Where Did THAT Come From: Essem and Co, Ularti”Where Did THAT Come From: Lanati, Menevis and Family
This is actually a fairly large body of characters spread across the two volumes of Star Master, even if they didn’t require as much work on my part as Shenti and her family did.
Continue reading “Where Did THAT Come From: Lanati, Menevis and Family”Where Did THAT Come From: Jetay and Khed
The two brothers at the heart of the Star Master tetralogy trilogy duology went through a pretty complicated evolution before I started writing.
February SFF Book Bonanza
Hello, there!
Dean F. Wilson has pulled together a massive sale of science fiction and fantasy books: all on Amazon, each for just $0.99!
He has graciously agreed to include my own new release, Waking the Dreamlost, in this sale. It is the second book in the Jaiya series of urban fantasy/paranormal romance novels, and the first book is free on all vendors. You can find Waking the Dreamlost under the fantasy and paranormal romance heading, when you click on this link to check out all the discounted books!
You may be hearing from me about these sales opportunities several times this year, possibly as often as once a month. I hope I can help you find some new reading material at a price you can afford. Happy Shopping!
End of Year Wrap-Up
This year, the writing and publishing went fairly well. With the help of some family members who graciously became my beta readers/proofreaders, I finished, polished, and published a new book in a new (for me) genre, and finished NaNoWriMo2020 in spite of some setbacks. I cut severely back on my marketing costs, which had gotten out of hand in past years, and only got back into active marketing at the very end of the year, coinciding with the new release. So far it’s going better than I had any reason to expect. The modest royalties from my book sales and pages read in Kindle Unlimited to date, would almost cover the costs of my test ads on Bookbub and my low budget ad spend on Bookbub and Amazon. We’ll see how long this moment of almost breaking even lasts.
My hope was to finish and publish my first space opera, start working on the sequel while I was polishing the first one, and maybe write the second half of the sequel for NaNoWriMo2020. I didn’t manage that, and given the extra time that the Covid shutdown bought me, first during administrative leave and then with telework, I feel like I could have done more. But it took me a long time to feel my way through the second half of the first space opera, and a moderately long time to clean up the initial complete draft of the book. I finished that cleanup/polishing process only a few days before NaNoWriMo, and it left my creative energies kind of drained. I’ve found at least three short scenes and two longer sections that need major reworking in the second space opera, before I proceed anything further with it.
Still I wrote 100,000 more or less useable words over the course of the year (second half of first space opera+first half of second space opera), polished and published my longest book to date, created its cover, and constructed a wallet-friendly promotional campaign for its launch.
Plans for next year? Try to have Star Master Book 2 published by the end of 2021; refresh the Ancestors of Jaiya series (proofreading and new covers) somewhere along the way. Write as much as I can of Star Master Book 3, and keep daydreaming and outlining that high fantasy idea that keeps popping up. We’ll see how all that works out.
Jaglion Press 