I’m contracting THE PURIST to NineStar Press for a release date sometime in 2018. It almost certainly *won’t* have this cover, and possibly not this title, but I look forward to seeing what NineStar does with it. Way back in 1996 or 1997 I wrote a 6K short story set in my Lonhra Sequence fantasy…
Read More ‘The Purist’ has a home with NineStar PressPlaying with bits of art I’ve collected or created over the years, to give myself another visual image-set for THE PURIST, a big fantasy novel currently out in Queryland.* Yes, this is SINGER IN RHUNSHAN revisited, massively revised, and (I hope) getting closer to being fit for outside reading. For now, I’m so happy the…
Read More ‘The Purist’ mood board 3So, apparently I’m doing this thing called Pitch Wars next week. I have my first chapter reasonably polished, hammered together something that might pass for a hook, cooked up an 800-word synopsis, and achieved a query that didn’t make my current CPs barf. I am exhausted but happy. For people stalking my mms, there’s plenty…
Read More My Pitch Wars bioI say ‘first edition’ because I have several future paths for my first published novel, now that its association with Loose Id LLC has come to an end. Moro’s Price no longer exists as an ebook on Amazon.com, or on the Loose Id website. Over the next month or so, it will leave AllRomance Ebooks,…
Read More Moro’s Price first edition 2012 to 2016Less than a year since I got to use this image of a Space Shuttle lifting off: On sub: two words, two decades behind them. My crazy romance/quest/fantasy novel is out on agented submission now, at its full 91,000+ words. Its fate is out of my hands at the moment. It reminds me of when…
Read More On sub!For now, revisions are done (again) on the fantasy novel Singer in Rhunshan, at least until my agent and possibly some editors wade in. This is what the manuscript looked like last September: This is what it looks like now: gone from 54K to 91K, plus sequel and series synopses. As I was in the final…
Read More Happiness, part whatever…is adding a kickass prologue that brings the fantasy novel up past 85,000 words, which is the minimum that several great Big Five publishers want to see. Once I finish minor tweaking to answer comments from four beta readers, I should see a book around 87K. More to the point, it’s a good book. I’m…
Read More More happinessAccording to SFWA guidelines, the fantasy novella has been a novel for the last eight thousand words. Huh. That means I’m working on two novels and two novellas this fall. Eeep. *** Update, September 26, 2014: the provisionally-titled Singer in Rhunshan is finished at 53,200 words. I’m not going to pretend there are no typos, tense…
Read More Wordcount milestonesI’ve had an on-again, off-again fling with the idea of self-publishing a fantasy novella. At each stage in the game, the beast grows a little bigger. From the original 6.5K or so short story I started years ago, Singer in Rhunshan is now over 33K. (As of 7-20-2014, it’s now at 35.5K. I think it’s…
Read More Adventures in novella writingThis is a classic piece of advice for new(ish) writers. It’s also one of the most frustrating, for a couple of reasons. Often, we simply don’t know how to do that yet. It takes time and work to gain the skills to ‘show’ instead of merely narrating important details. Even the critical reading skills to…
Read More Show me, don’t tell me…Only I don’t really have an ending deadline date, because I know all about best-laid plans. Singer in Rhunshan will probably, at some point in the next few months, become a self-published fantasy novella. There were valid reasons to delay this step: my fears, my ego, the complexity of doing this right, my worries that…
Read More My self-publishing countdown begins…Round Four of the Singer in Rhunshan e-pub cover: more texture in foreground, clothes, and trees. Deeper shadows. Highlights in the shadow-figure in the sky. The sig to the lower left is a stop-gap. I’ll be sending off my real one to my cover designer once we get this part nailed down. This is a…
Read More Further cover adventures (slight adult content)Good news, everyone: I have found a skilled cover designer to do the text that I am obviously not qualified to go anywhere near. The designer and a pack of sharp-eyed folks in an online art forum found all the places I’ve messed up, and pointed them out. It’s called a critique, and it’s a…
Read More Singer cover, round threeSinger in Rhunshan is now in its more or less final form, hovering around 16,000 words/75 pages. Too big for a short story now, but respectable for a novelette. It is a romantic fantasy action/adventure with discreet hints of a male/male/female love triangle (but no actual sex in this part of the story), and a…
Read More ‘Singer in Rhunshan’ novelette inches closer to publication…Okay, okay, there was the socially questionable and morally bankrupt comic book I wrote when I was maybe seven, but that didn’t last longer than fifteen minutes, a stern warning, and the ten feet to Mom’s shredder. It doesn’t count. Nor do the 130K of various fan fiction stories I’ve written over the years. What…
Read More My first real try at self-publishing