Monster hunters, spaceships and comedy of manners by indie author Mel Dunay
Christmastide is on February 2. If your parish does the blessing of the throats on the feast of St. Blaise (February 3), maybe give it a shot. We need all the help we can get these days.
In other news, my editors/first readers sent back Spiderstar, the sequel to Shadow Captain, with their notes, so revisions will be ongoing for probably the next few weeks. Also need to work on the cover. Stay tuned.
Complete at a shade under 94,000 words. Next step is to get it out of Scrivener and into a Word document for my volunteer editors to review. They will be out of town for part of this coming week, so I have a little bit of a breather to get the Word document ready. I should feel more triumphant than I do, but I’ve been fighting with this one in one form or another since November 2020, so by now all I can muster is a bit of weary relief, in the style of Best Van Helsing.
Well, I was about halfway through the edit on Spiderstar, the sequel to Shadow Captain, when NaNoWriMo started. When it ended, I only had about 15K words left to edit, and now I’m down to 10K-ish. After that, comes review by my volunteer beta readers/editors, cover art, final revisions, and publication. Publication is a moving target; looking like late January/early February of 2023 at this point.
In other news, I am most likely looking at another radical shift in genre for my next set of novels. Stay tuned.
AetherCzar (Hans G. Schantz) has graciously included Shadow Captain in his Black Friday Sale. With over 190 books free or $0.99, I’m sure there’s something for everyone.
Right now, I’m still revising the sequel to Shadow Captain. So, basically, this is going to be more of a NaNoEdMo until I get that completed. If I somehow miraculously get done in the first half of November, I might try for an actual first-drafting project, in the NaNo tradition. I have occasionally managed full 50K words in two-ish weeks, but it’s been a long time. So, here’s a cover version of my NaNoWriMo theme song, because somehow this situation doesn’t seem to call for Jerry Reed.
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!
I just completed the new ending and some of the expansion scenes for Star Master Book 2. For more about the long, complicated evolution of this space opera novel, see here, here and here. Yes, I have been working on this book for a while, but I hope to have it out by the end of this year, especially since I have no plans to do NaNoWriMo.
For now, my plans are a short break to work up a presentation for day job, play mobile games, read Golden Age mysteries, watch Fringe and Don Matteo with family members, and brainstorm whatever comes after the Star Master duology.
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” →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” →
Jaglion Press