June 2014

I’ve added a newsletter subscription to the official website.  You’ll see it over on the right side in a widget right below the search widget.  You can subscribe if you’d like updates about book releases as well as contests and such.  So if you’d like to keep up with the series and know what’s going on, go ahead and subscribe.  Everything is local to the official site, so your e-mail address will go no further, nor will it be used for any other purpose.

Here’s a stupid little fact. “The Creators” race in the Unseen Things series are called the Zethichtalarin. I wanted to give them a funky name so I could kinda use it as joke in the books that it was so hard to say, which I did. However, I kinda screwed myself over, because I can never remember how to spell it, so every time I use their true name in one of the books, I actually have to copy and paste it from a text file I have where I keep a list of the different races. It’s a pain, but it’s also kinda funny. 🙂

I know I said a few days ago that I’d started working on the next book, but I never really consider a book started until the first chapter’s done.  Well, I just finished the first chapter of Resurgence, so now we can consider it officially under way.  The reason it took me a few days to get through the first chapter when I normally write a chapter a day is because my lack of sleep really caught up with me, so I spent most of the last few days like a zombie.  No matter how much I slept, it never felt like enough, and when I was actually awake I was funky and worthless.  I think I’m doing better now though.  Well enough to have finished the first chapter anyway, so there ya go. 🙂

After saying just this morning that I was going to take a little break before I started the next book, I went ahead and started on the next book.  Why?  Because I finished the cover and all the other graphics for it this morning, and then got the epub file all cleaned out and ready to go.  Combine that with the fact that I don’t really have anything else to do at the moment, and that all adds up to me doing exactly what I said I wasn’t going to do.  *sigh*

Anyway, the next book is titled Resurgence and it picks up about a day or so after the end of Encounters.  I haven’t gotten too far into it yet because I’ve had very little sleep, but at least I got started on it.  Figuring out how to start a book is the hard part, so at least I’ve got that out of the way now, and I’m sure that once I’ve had some decent sleep I’ll be getting right back to it.  It’s funny what a lack of sleep does to you when you’re trying to write.  I can always tell during the editing process where I was really tired, because I start finding little telltale mistakes and things often aren’t really worded as well as they could be.

Oh, and I decided this morning that I’m only going to do the KDP select thing for the 90 days unless something drastic happens with my sales.  I really don’t like not being able to have the books for sale elsewhere, especially here on the website.  I’ve added Encounters to the site here already and I have the Smashwords file already prepared, as I’ll do with the next one and the one after that, just so everything’s ready to go.  Now mind you, I might change my mind after I have my next free weekend for Origins.  I’m going to attempt to promote that one better, so I’ll make a final decision after I see how well that one goes.

I’m very happy to announce that Encounters, book 10 of the Unseen Things series is now available.

Synopsis: The Nathalis destroyed the moons in seven different dimensions in an effort to to wipe out the Zethichtalarin threat, and while it did succeed in killing off the majority of their race, it was inevitable that some would escape to other dimensions before their worlds were destroyed.

It was assumed that the survivors would no longer be a threat, but when Beth and Erin encounter one of their military officers in the Paradise dimension, that assumption is quickly proven wrong.

Now that the Zethichtalarin have begun to show themselves again, what lengths will they go to in order to rebuild their empire? The answer may be found in the Faranox dimension, where a tribal leader from one of the free villages has formed an army with advanced tactical knowledge that no Faranox tribal leader would normally possess.

As the evidence mounts that the Zethichtalarin were behind the formation of that army, the group in Washington forms a team whose job is to search the Faranox dimension for those responsible, and put an end to their plans for a resurgence once and for all.

You can purchase this and all the other books in the series by going to my Amazon author page.

Also, if you’d like to add any or all of the series on Goodreads, you can head on over to my author page on there as well.

That’s the question someone asked in one of the LinkedIn groups I belong to.  During the course of the discussion in the comments, some people seemed to infer that the best way to write a series was for each book to contain a self contained story that was all wrapped up by the time you reached the end, and then the next book would have enough back story and information so that if the reader hasn’t read the previous book, at least they’d know what was going on to some degree.  I posted a response to that way of thinking that I believe is worth sharing.

The novels in my series aren’t stand alone simply because that’s the type of a series it is. I wrap up the plot elements specific to that book during the course of the story, but then at the end I lead in to the next major plot element so people will want to read the next one to find out what happens next. I do this for two reasons. First, if each book is a stand alone, then there’s less incentive for people to go on with the series after they finish each one, and second, I really can’t stand books that get mired down in all the back story of things that I’ve already read in the previous book.

Really there are two types of series. The first type would be a series of stand alone books that each have individual stories, and the second type is more like a television series with a running storyline that continues from book to book.

My particular series is the second type. If people want to know what happened before, they should read them in order. You wouldn’t watch the third season of Breaking Bad for example and expect them to keep rehashing stuff that happened during the second season.

Both types of series have their merits and their appeal for different readers, and I personally think there’s more than enough room out there for both.