Category: Writing

Weird Wednesday: Audiobooks!

Posted on Posted in Cool Books, Cool Websites, Jaiya, Marrying A Monster, Mel Dunay, Oldblood Series, Paranormal Romance, Space Opera, Weird Science, WritingTagged Leave a comment

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!

Thoughts for Weird Wednesday: The Measure of a Muse

Posted on Posted in Myth, WritingTagged Leave a comment

There are writers who, when they speak of their Muse, are basically personifying their subconscious mind. (e.g. “My Muse won’t give me the rest of the story, it just gives me the opening of a different story. Argh!”) If it works for them, great, and if it doesn’t work for them, it’s not my job to tell them what to do instead. I don’t know what I’m doing half the time myself. I do know that my subconscious is me, and that I’ve not derived any particular benefit from trying to personify it as an Other.

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Done. Again. For Now.

Posted on Posted in NaNoWriMo, Publishing Plans, Space Opera, WritingTagged , Leave a comment

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.

Real Estate Website That Lists Castles For Sale

Posted on Posted in Cool Websites, Fantasy, Steampunk, World Building, WritingTagged

I suspect I am the last one to find out about this site, but it’s still cool. Great place to research castles for your fantasy novel, or just daydream about how to spend your hypothetical lottery winnings.

Welcome to https://castleist.com

Also, here’s an interesting study from 2018 of how Lake Powell in Colorado suffers from water management rules that favor keeping Lake Mead (downstream of Lake Powell) filled, and by extension favors the lawns, swimming pools and delta smelt of California, the most populous area supplied by Lake Mead.

Where Did THAT Come From: Essem and Co, Ularti

Posted on Posted in Fantasy, Jaiya, Mel Dunay, Publishing Plans, Space Opera, World Building, WritingTagged , , Leave a comment

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.

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Where Did THAT Come From: Lanati, Menevis and Family

Posted on Posted in Fantasy, Jaiya, Marrying A Monster, Mel Dunay, Paranormal Romance, Publishing Plans, Space Opera, WritingTagged , , Leave a comment

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.

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Where Did THAT Come From: Samar, the White Knights, and the Red Knights

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The White Knights are largely my response to the Jedi: a fallen order of psychic warriors formerly revered for their nobility of character, now hated and propagandized against. They were called Paladins, and the Red Knights were called Pioneers, until the early stages of editing Shadow Captain, when I decided these names would cause too much confusion with the Partisan faction in the same story. Akira Kurosawa, although certainly extremely gifted, didn’t have quite as much influence on me as Howard Pyle and the Story of King Arthur and his Knights, so that accounts for some of the differences between the White Knights and their inspiration, the more samurai-influenced Jedi.

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From a Certain Point of View…

Posted on Posted in NaNoWriMo, Space Opera, WritingTagged , 2 Comments

So, NaNoWriMo2021…not a success in terms of wordcount. It looks like I will finish the month around or slightly under 18,000 words, the lowest results for any NaNo I have attempted. However, I did have a helpful insight yesterday in terms of what I was working on.

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