Uncategorized

Insomnia is a bitch and a half to deal with.  I should know, because  I’ve been dealing with it since I was in my teens, and let me tell you, it’s not what most people think it is.  Most people think it’s just the inability to sleep.  While that’s partially true, it’s not really accurate.  Insomnia is the inability to sleep for long enough periods for your brain to clean itself, which it does while you’re asleep.  When you only sleep for anywhere from one to three hours at a time, it doesn’t allow the brain sufficient enough time to do that, and the result of that is that you walk around mentally unfocused and you have this heaviness in your head like you really want to go to sleep, but you can’t.  You can end up with memory problems, depression and other issues as well.

The fact is, that just recently I went through a few weeks where I had it really bad, and as such I got to a point where I just wasn’t thinking clearly enough to continue writing.  I wanted to, and I knew I should be, but knowing that I should be and having the ability to do so are two different things.

Anyway, I finally got some good, solid sleep.  Enough that I was able to finish up chapter 10 finally.  By the way, chapter 10 has one of the most ridiculous scenes I’ve ever written in it, and considering some of the nonsense I’ve written in past books, that’s saying something.  I was sitting here laughing as I was writing it, and the ridiculousness just sort of started feeding back on itself as I made my way through the scene.

Anyway, that’s what’s been going on.  Hopefully I’ll continue to sleep regularly now, at least for a while.  Wish me luck.

I’ve been saying for a long time now that the series is winding down.  I have a few more ideas that I’d like to explore with it though before I end it entirely…if I ever do actually end it entirely.  I think after I finish writing Invasion, which will be book 20 of the series, I’m going to take a break and write another book that’ll be entirely it’s own thing and have no connection to the series whatsoever.  It’s the story about a girl who, after working a string of crappy convenience store jobs, goes to work as an assistant for a private investigator.  There’s going to be quite a bit of humor in it, and I haven’t decided yet whether there’ll be a paranormal element to it or not.  Right now I just have the beginning of it written, and it’s been sitting there collecting dust ever since.  That’s why I think I’m going to go ahead and write that one after I finish Invasion, and then maybe come back to the series after that.  Will this new one turn into a series of its own?  I have no idea.  I’ll just have to see how it goes.  If it does, I may alternate back and forth until the Unseen Things series has reached it’s conclusion, whenever that happens to be.  I introduced something in the last book that needs to be explored more, but Invasion isn’t the book to do it in, so we’ll see what happens.

Anyway, those are my plans as of right now, and are as always subject to change.  If I do decide to put that other book off for a while, I’ll announce that once the decision is made, but as of right now, my plans are to finally get it written.

“My soul lies frozen, dormant and trapped within this shambling mound of miserable flesh from the very moment the light and warmth of yours escaped from this world. Oh how I long for the quiet touch of death, for my only wish…my deepest desire is that our souls may once again find their way home through the darkness, and that, if only for the briefest of moments, they might be allowed to touch…and to become whole once more.” – Duane L. Martin

I literally woke up with that running through my head earlier.  I don’t know where it came from or what I was dreaming about that triggered it, but there ya go.  It’s not from any of my books or short stories and I have no use for it other than to post it here for general interest value, but I thought it worked nice as a personal quote.

I figured as long as I was redesigning some of the other covers I wasn’t happy with, I might as well do this one too.  I wasn’t really unhappy with this one so to speak.  I actually liked it, but it seemed a bit spartan to me.  This one is more representative of the story.  I sort of debated whether or not to change it, because I really do like the old one, but I finally decided to freshen things up a bit with the new one.  Now that I finally got this done, I can get back to writing my next one.

The new cover is now, or will be updated soon on all of the retail sites, and here on the official site as well.

As promised, here is the new cover for book 5, Immortals.  I was never happy with the original cover at all.  It was cheap looking, had bad skin texture, etc…  This new cover is basically the same design as the old cover, only it looks about a bazillion times better.  The e-books have all been updated with the new covers wherever they’re available.  The Smashwords premium sites like Barnes and Noble, Kobo, iTunes and others will be updating soon.

I think this is the last cover I’ll be updating, as it was the last one I really wasn’t happy with.  I may do a new cover for Origins eventually, but I’m not sure yet.  I’ll have to see what I cam come up with.  If I can come up with something better, I’ll update that one as well.  If not, then this is it for now.

I’ve never really been happy with the cover of book 2, so tonight I designed a new one for it that I like a lot better.  The content of the book is unchanged.  It simply has a much nicer looking cover now.

I will probably redesign the cover for book 5 as well sooner rather than later since I’ve never been happy with that one either.

As for book 20, the one I’m working on now, I’ve been having a lot of fun with it.  Jake and Lana are the two characters I have the most fun writing, and I just finished the chapters where they had their first encounter with the Skinks, and then later had to take out a whole camp full of them using one of the cheapest, plans I could possibly come up with for them.  I mean really, it was so cheap and dirty that it was just an absolute blast to write.  I’m working on chapter 7 at the moment, so I still have about eight and a half chapters left to go.  One thing that I’m definitely going to include in the book is the full story where Jake and Lana did a job for a guy and then ended up having to kill both him and his two young sons in order for he and Lana to be able to escape with their lives.  It was a really bad situation and one that affected him deeply, and still does to this day.  I ran through the whole thing in Travelers, but I’m going to do it in full detail in Invasion.

Anyway, that’s it for now.  If and when I update the cover for book 5, I’ll post another update with it.