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Bone Walker

Bone Walker Soundtrack Update

Folks, this is what the top of my Not Recently Played playlist looked like this morning:

It's a Real Album and Everything

It’s a Real Album and Everything

I had the distinct pleasure of listening to this on the way into work this morning, and have never been more pleased to tell Dara, in the parlance of my day job, “QA signs off on this release”.

I’m particularly excited about the instrumental tracks. The fiddle playing shines like diamonds, a testament not only to the skill of our three fiddlers, but also to Dara’s engineering and the final polish from the official mastering engineer. The Kitsune at War and Bring the Storm tracks in particular capture the mood of those bits of Bone Walker perfectly. And I gotta say, the Klopfenpop remix of The Burke-Gilman Troll kicks all the ass in a tri-state radius. I’m pretty sure it left no unkicked ass anywhere between Vancouver and Portland. 😀

Release of this thing should therefore be coming REALLY SOON. I’ll be letting all backers of appropriate levels know when the digital download of the soundtrack is ready for you. Dara will be moving forward with that as well as with the creation of the physical CDs. She’s made some lovely case art using the covers of both the novels, and has picked out some gorgeous paper to use for the liner insert as well. Looking VERY forward to having these to sell when we hit Conflikt at the end of this month!

Don’t forget, if you actually want one of the physical CDs, preordering on Bandcamp will be the best way to get it. And if you haven’t listened to the preview tracks yet, you can find them right over here.

And let me encourage you all to please share the heck out of this link, too! Remember, Dara and I as well as the various musicians who all appear on this soundtrack are indie artists here, and if we want to have a prayer of selling this thing to the general public, every little bit of word of mouth helps so much.

Lastly, let me finish up by noting that I’m also very close to having the Bone Walker manuscript ready to release to proofreading. I need to put the sample chapter of Faerie Blood into the back of it, and I have ALSO gotten permission from Carina Press to cross-promote my Carina books in the back of the book as well. So I need to do that work.

Once this is done, I’ll be ready to have the book proofread. I’ve had two people express interest already in proofreading, but if anyone else wants to volunteer, let me know ASAP!

Thanks again to all for your patience and support!

January 8, 2015 by
Bone Walker, Victory of the Hawk

Monday morning news: Boosting the Signal, Bone Walker, and more

If you missed them over the weekend, I put up two Boosting the Signal posts featuring recent releases from Dragonwell Press–for The Blackwell Family Secret: The Guardians of Sin and Nine Planets.

Check them out, won’t you? Dragonwell is the venture spearheaded by fellow former Drollerie author Anna Kashina, and a couple other former Drollerie authors have shown up there too–notably, Cindy Lynn Speer, who wrote The Chocolatier’s Wife, which I adored. Their website is here.

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Meanwhile, as of last night, I finished the editing sweep for Bone Walker! Which means I’m now significantly closer to getting this book ready to finally deploy to Kickstarter backers, and then to the world! \m/

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And speaking of Bone Walker, don’t forget–Faerie Blood remains on sale for a tidy little 99 cents for all ebook editions! Details are here.

As always whenever I put one of my indie books on sale, the price applies to all places where the book is sold, and also to anyone who’d like to buy the book directly from me (which is the best option if you’d like the fancy PDF).

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And continuing the Bone Walker theme, don’t forget either that the soundtrack for Bone Walker is available for pre-order right over here on Bandcamp! There are preview tracks and everything!

Dara’s busily working on the cover art and liner notes for the CD, and if you’d like one of the physical discs she’s having made, a pre-order will be the best way to get it!

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And speaking of pre-orders–Victory of the Hawk IS already available for pre-order on some sites. I’ve seen it show up on Amazon, B&N, Kobo, and Google Play! So if you’re a customer on any of those sites, do consider grabbing the book. Links are on Victory’s official page!

January 5, 2015 by
Bone Walker

Bone Walker Editing Sweep COMPLETE

Ladies and gentlemen, I have finished my edit pass through the second draft of Bone Walker. Which now puts me SIGNIFICANTLY closer to delivering this novel to my Kickstarter backers, and then to the world at large!

All the mad props go to editor JoSelle and also to backer Susan, since their two edit passes combined to help me fix quite a few things in the manuscript. I rarely make actual typos. But I do periodically repeat words, leave words out, or replace a word I intend with some other (correctly spelled but nonetheless incorrect) word. Susan caught a whole bunch of places where I’d done things of this nature, and JoSelle caught others.

What happens next? Now I need to write the front and back matter for the book, which will include the Acknowledgements and the Author’s Notes. I’ll be adding blurbs that I’m getting in from a few folks, and I’ll put in an updated About the Author section and probably some data on my other books as well. I expect to have these things done by this coming weekend.

Once those are finished, I’ll be putting out a call for volunteers to proofread what will hopefully be the final master copy that I’ll use to start generating the official ebook. So if any of you all might be up for proofreading that, let me know!

The ebook I create will be the epub, from which I’ll also be creating a mobi to deploy to Amazon. As we did last time, however, Dara will be taking my master working file and using that to create the print layout and the PDF edition. The epub, mobi, PDF, and print masters will also need checking, so I’ll be putting out a second call for THAT.

Meanwhile, I’ll be moving forward with buying Bone Walker its own ISBNs as well as filing copyright on it, and working with Third Place to prepare them for creating the print books as well. More bulletins on all of these things as they happen!

And last but definitely not least, Dara has been moving forward with creating the artwork for the soundtrack release. As I’ve been doing my edit pass this weekend, she’s been working on the liner notes for the CD. It’s been a very busy weekend for both of us!

But Bone Walker is COMING. And I’m really excited to be about to deliver Kendis, Christopher and Elessir’s next story to you all!

January 4, 2015 by
Bone Walker

The Great Bone Walker Editing Spree has BEGUN

I have now commenced editing on Bone Walker, book 2 of the Free Court of Seattle! As of this writing I’m four chapters in, and plan to be chugging through the rest of the chapters as my vacation from the day job continues. I anticipate being done with this editing pass by next week.

Once that’s done I’ll be putting out a call for final proofreaders. Some of my Kickstarter backers have already seen the first draft copy; the second draft copy won’t be much different from that. I’m basically juggling edits from editor JoSelle as well as a proofreading pass from beta reader and backer Susan, and I’m getting constructive commentary from them both. But it’s line-edit level commentary and proofreading, and I will not be making structural changes to the novel at this point.

However, when I’m done, I WILL still need eyes on the final draft. I’ll need a proofreading pass as well as people who can sanity-check both the ebook and print release files. I’ll put out a call with more details when I’m ready for that stage.

Dara would also like to call to your all’s attention that the soundtrack IS at the mastering engineer, and that she’s got a post up about pre-orders over here–featuring the melding of the Faerie Blood and Bone Walker covers that she did for the CD disc art!

If you backed the Kickstarter at $25 or above, you’ll be getting a digital copy of the soundtrack. But if you want a physical copy, or if you weren’t in on the Kickstarter, you should pre-order! Dara’s offering a special freebie to one pre-orderer, too, so go over to her link to check that out. Encourage others to pre-order as well if you’re so inclined!

Back into the editing now, all! And watch this space for more Bone Walker updates!

December 27, 2014 by
Bone Walker

Bone Walker status update!

I’ve already told my Kickstarter backers this, but for the rest of you, I am delighted to announce that Dara has officially sent the soundtrack for Faerie Blood and Bone Walker off to be mastered!

We are very excited about this, as it means we’re very, very close to being able to finally deliver this long-overdue reward to my Kickstarter backers. But it also means that Dara’s also able to deploy a brand new album! We’re even doing a replication run for it, so that we’ll have physical CDs to sell at Conflikt next month.

Want to check out what Dara did? You can find the album available for preorder RIGHT NOW right over here. So many exciting things going on on this. We’ve got vocals from Leannan Sidhe and Alexander James Adams, you guys. We’ve got multiple awesomely played fiddles. And we’ve even got a bitchin’ remix of the Burke-Gilman Troll set, courtesy of nerdcore master Klopfenpop.

What’s NOT up yet on the preview are readings by yours truly! I’ve read excerpts from both Faerie Blood AND Bone Walker for this soundtrack, and I’m here to tell you, I have much more respect now for people who do audiobook narration for a living. I only did four pieces over a weekend, and my throat really felt the work. But Dara did a masterful job layering my readings in on top of the instrumental sets, and we’re both very proud of how those tracks came out!

Important note on those readings, too–the Bone Walker readings are a little spoilery, so if you aren’t one of the Kickstarter backers who’ve read the early draft of the book, be advised about that. I tried to not get TOO spoilery with the excerpts I chose, which are both very action-heavy, but there will be some things in there that will probably make you go “WUT” until you actually read the book.

And SPEAKING OF THE BOOK–I’m about to go on two weeks of vacation over the holidays, during which I plan to be editing like a mad editing thing, in order to get Bone Walker ready to ship by Conflikt. And now that we’re signed off on the release of the soundtrack, Dara will be able to step up the pace on the cover design as well as desktops, postcards, and posters for backers. I’ll be bringing postcards and posters to Conflikt, too!

VERY excited about this, and looking very much forward to getting Bone Walker to you all!

December 15, 2014 by
Bone Walker, Queen of Souls, Victory of the Hawk

Victory of the Hawk (and Kickstarter) update

And now, a long overdue update on Victory of the Hawk! AND Kickstarter stuff!

Have been running annoyingly behind on getting this monster done, and managed to miss most of VCON for the second year in a row working on catching up. Got to the point that now I’m within scope for getting this monster’s first draft done by the end of this week, and shortly thereafter, there will be development edits.

How fast I can charge through those will, in turn, impact how fast I can charge through line edits. If all goes well, I could conceivably be done beating on this book by the end of the month. I’d like to be done before I scamper up to Canada again in November, this time for Operation SWING!, in which there will be ridiculous amounts of De Temps Antan!

If I’m done with edits on Victory by then, I’ll be swinging around to finally working on the edits on Bone Walker. When I go up to Canada for the De Temps Antan shows, I’ll be taking the entire week off–and between the two shows, I’ll be holed up in Cumberland working on edits on whatever’s popped next off the queue.

Once I can finally actually free up enough brain for the Bone Walker edits, they should go reasonably quickly since they’re all line-level edits, and I’m not going to be making any structural changes to the book at this point.

When Bone Walker‘s edits are finished, Dara and I will work on layout and on the design of the cover. And when that happens, I’ll have a better idea of when the final ebook and print editions will be deployed. The likely timeframe for this is early 2015, at this point. I’d like to have Bone Walker out before Victory is due to drop in April 2015.

Meanwhile, Dara has been doing a hard push to finish up the Bone Walker soundtrack. She’s very close to finishing the musical bits, although she and I still need to do the recordings for the readings I’ll be doing as accompaniment to the musical tracks. My ability to musically participate in the album has had to fall to the wayside, due to my having to focus on writing actual words, about which I’m sad. But on the other hand, we’ve gotten in excellent people to work with Dara. Especially Alexander James friggin’ Adams, about which I am not sad in the slightest.

When Bone Walker is cleared off my plate, I’ll be turning my attention to finishing up the novellas in the Warder universe, also due to Kickstarter backers. All three of these are still untitled, but to refresh your all’s memories, they are:

  • Origin story for Millicent Wray, who later is Millicent Merriweather, Warder of Seattle
  • Story set in Providence, RI, about a psychic who must help a man solve the murder of his Warder sister
  • Story of a musician who helps a Warder stop the hunt of migrating deep sea creatures

And once all THIS is done, well, we’ll see what happens next. What’s most likely to pop off the queue is the long-overdue Queen of Souls, which needs to be cleaned up so I can try to query it somewhere.

Wish me luck, folks. The rest of this year’s going to be busy, and next year promises to be more of the same!

October 7, 2014 by
Bone Walker, Music

A long overdue Kickstarter update

I’m still dealing with my obligations to Carina Press for the Rebels of Adalonia trilogy, which means I haven’t been able to put attention to finishing up editing Bone Walker and prepping it for release. To wit: AUGH.

Meanwhile, Dara and I both have had medical crap to deal with, as many of you know–my medical crap from last fall, as well as Dara’s eye surgeries, plural. She’s got another one coming as well, since she developed cataracts after the last procedure, and that’s got to be dealt with. To wit: AUGH.

AND, as Dara’s been posting about a lot lately, she’s had to throw a LOT of time into renovation of one of the tenant spaces in MurkSouth. This has taken a huge amount of her time and our money, though now she’s finally finished with that, and if I may say so she’s worked magic in that kitchen. You can see before and after pics here.

BUT, we do finally have some progress to report! Even though I’ve been stymied on dealing with the book, Dara’s made some progress on getting the soundtrack done. She’s had significant progress on the instrumental sets–and we do also have some very, VERY exciting news.

We got Alexander James Adams.

Those of you in the Pacific Northwest fandom community, and hell, any of you who are into filk and SF/F-based or pagan-based music at all–you know who I’m talking about. He who stepped in to take up the mantle of song when Heather Alexander went off to Faerie. THAT Alexander James Adams. We are beyond delighted to have him joining us on this project, lending not only fiddle, but backup vocals and some drum work to various tracks.

And now Dara’s got a preview track to share with you all. It’s right over here!

This album is going to ROCK. 😀

August 5, 2014 by