Browsing Tag

bone walker

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!

Bone Walker

And now: a blurb for Bone Walker!

Tonight is the first night I’ve worked on Bone Walker in ages, and one of the things I wanted to accomplish tonight was to write a proper blurb for the book. This’ll be cover copy for the back cover, as well as for the forthcoming official page on this site for the book.

Here’s my first take at the blurb!

Two months should be long enough for a girl to learn to cope when she finds out she’s half-Sidhe, or so Kendis Thompson has convinced herself. She wants nothing more than as normal a life as possible, playing her violin and pursuing her growing relationship with Christopher, Warder Second of Seattle. But when the Unseelie bard Elessir falls through a portal out of Faerie, bringing with him a ghostly peril that puts her best friend Jude’s life and sanity in danger, Kendis must test the strength of her new magic. And when the bone walker Melorite threatens all of the Emerald City, Kendis must choose between saving everyone she loves—and succumbing to the dominion of the Unseelie Court.

Pretty happy with this wording, and this’ll be a decent working draft, though the final word choices may change between now and when the book is ready to deploy. Need to think of a proper way to condense this down to a sentence, too.

What do you think, sirs? Anybody got any wording recommendations?

And oh, this is going to be fun. 😀 Let’s see if I can get this puppy edited before New Years, shall I?

Bone Walker, Vengeance of the Hunter, Victory of the Hawk

Status update on ALL the books

As of this morning I received an official final Word doc version of Vengeance of the Hunter. This means we are now SIGNED OFF on the text of this book. Next comes the cover copy and the cover art, and I hope to be showing you all these some time soon in coming weeks.

And this means as well that I need to start planning on Victory of the Hawk and start writing this puppy WAY sooner than I did Vengeance. Getting Vengeance ready to ship was an exercise in pushing it, and I need to NOT DO THAT for Victory. Expect me to be posting more updates about the third installment of Rebels of Adalonia in coming weeks as well, for the sake of visibility and accountability!

ALSO: I need to start the official edit pass on Bone Walker. Which will be starting THIS WEEKEND. I want this thing done and dealt with and hopefully ready to ship before Vengeance comes out in April. Again, look for more updates to come on this.

Likewise, I have the shorter works I want to finish off as well and get to Kickstarter backers who are LONG overdue for getting the shinies that are due them.

Lot of work before me, folks, as I head into 2014. Looking forward to taking it on and letting you know how it goes!

Bone Walker, Short Pieces, Vengeance of the Hunter

Long overdue Kickstarter update + Vengeance of the Hunter

Just to bring folks up to speed on where I am with all the things I’m trying to pull out of my head: my long-waiting Kickstarter backers, y’all will have noticed I have not yet delivered unto you Bone Walker or any of the other remaining rewards. This is a combination of four factors: one, Vengeance of the Hunter pretty much eating my brain for the last few months; two, my abrupt return to the land of Medical Fun (spoiler alert: not really fun); and three, emergency eye surgery on the part of Dara, as I’ve previously posted; four, delay on getting the rest of my edits back from JoSelle, who’s been working on editing Bone Walker for me.

As of this writing I am in what will be hopefully the final line edits for Vengeance. My goal is to finish this edit pass and hand the manuscript back to my editor this weekend. She will let me know if I need to do any remaining tweaks to it, and the goal is to get it squared away before I go offline for surgery on November 11th.

I have also been talking with JoSelle about getting those edits on Bone Walker back, and our game plan moving forward is that she will be doing everything in her power to get them to me by end of November. Either way, I will be commencing my edit sweep on Bone Walker on December 1st. If I have enough brain for it following surgery, I’ll actually start before–but this is me allowing myself some time for recovery to happen. Ditto on finishing the shorter works due to Kickstarter backers.

Related to those shorter works as well–I’m working on getting some cover art together for “The Blood of the Land”, the short story I’d previously done in the Warder universe. Once that’s ready I will be making that available as an immediate freebie to Kickstarter folks, and slightly after that, will be deploying it onto the various places where Faerie Blood is already available for sale.

Meanwhile, Dara’s having had to do eye surgery has thrown her for a loop in getting soundtrack work done, too, but she is recovering from that nicely and we hope to resume work on that ASAP. I also need to hand Dara the data she needs to do the poster and postcard layouts for the Bone Walker cover so that I can get those out to folks as well.

Kickstarter folks, as soon as I’m done with the Vengeance edit sweep, you’ll be hearing from me further. I’m really sorry for this ongoing delay, and that I have to ask for your patience for a little longer. Hang in there. Bone Walker is coming.

Bone Walker

This just in: first draft of Bone Walker is DONE!

A lot of you have now seen me post about this either to the social networks OR to Kickstarter backer notices, but for those of you who have not, I am thrilled to announce that I just finally completed the very first draft of Bone Walker, Book 2 of The Free Court of Seattle!

The book clocks in at just over 86,000 words, so it’s a leaner and meaner book than Faerie Blood–and in more ways than just word count. There’s more action here than in the previous book, and more ensemble cast action as well, as for the first time I’m introducing scenes from the points of view of other characters besides Kendis. Christopher, Jude, Jake, and especially Elessir all get camera time, along with the story’s primary antagonist.

I’ve sent the book off to editor JoSelle Vanderhooft, and have also made it available to all the Kickstarter backers who bought in for that specific book. I will also make it available to people who specifically want to beta read for me, so if you didn’t get a chance to support the Kickstarter but you’d really like to see Book 2, now’s your chance!

JoSelle’s taking three weeks to do her full edit pass, and will be doing developmental edits on it as well as lower-level copyedit changes. But I’d really love to get beta reader feedback as well, and so if you can beta in the next three weeks, you can see the first draft!

Once changes are incorporated from both JoSelle and anybody who chimes in on the beta run, I’ll be doing a second draft which will also eventually need to be beta read. So there’ll be a second opportunity as well for those who aren’t able to join this first round. All beta readers will of course get their names in the Acknowledgements, and anybody who isn’t already getting a production copy due to Kickstarter backer status will be entitled to one as well for your efforts!

So if you’d like in, go look at this post. The password is ‘bugbash’.

Let the beta reading begin!

Bone Walker

Beta reading Bone Walker

And now, a status report on Bone Walker!

I am now in the final push to finish the first draft. As of this writing I have signed off on the new Prologue and chapters 1-4. I have chapters 5-25 yet to go, and am hoping to hand them off to editor JoSelle on Friday, or at the very least some time this weekend. (Since it’s a three-day weekend, I suspect I’m going to be blowing a lot of it finishing the sweep.)

The book’s current word count is 84,048 words, and I am pretty sure the first draft will be coming in at not too much above that–which means, still shorter than Faerie Blood.

What happens once I finish the draft will be this: I’m going to send it to JoSelle, who will then do her sweep through it. She’s going to be doing a thorough edit, both copyedit-level changes and bigger-picture development stuff.

However, I will also simultaneously release the book to anybody who wants to beta read it. Kickstarter supporters are going to get automatic access to the draft as well.

Since the book is being professionally edited, this first round of beta reading will not necessarily need to be as extensive. This is not to say, potential beta readers, that you should not beta read the hell out of it! It’s just to say that this is more optional than it would otherwise be if I hadn’t engaged an actual editor to look at the book. 😉

Note also that this will indeed be the first round of beta reading. When I finish incorporating JoSelle’s recommended changes as appropriate (and any changes from beta reading round 1), I will also need eyes on the resulting second draft. So if you don’t get into the first round of reading, there will be a second opportunity!

All beta readers will get their names into the Acknowledgements. I will offer a free digital copy of the finished book to beta readers as well–I cannot unfortunately offer print since print copies will be limited in number. But beta readers can definitely have a digital copy in the format of their choice if they’re not already getting it via supporting the Kickstarter!

So talk to me, people, if you want in on either round!