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I’m currently 25% done with writing Invasion, which is book 20 of the series.  This one’s different than the other books though, and I’m finding it quite stimulating to write it this way.

See, when I had the idea to tell Jake and Lana’s story from just before the Echnid invasion all the way up to the point where they headed out for Cottonwood, Utah, where they ended up in book 17 of the series (Travelers), I was planning on writing it as just a regular book about their experiences.  However, just before I started writing it, I had an idea.  That idea was to do something totally different than I’ve done with any of the other books, and that was to have them sitting around in the living room of their home with Derek, Jarrod, Tina and Sarah.  They’re relating the story to them, and during the story parts it’s written as it happened.  When it comes back to them in the present day, they keep getting interrupted by various people coming through the house.  They also discuss various things in relation to the story, and ask Jake and Lana questions about the different things they’ve told them.

So there’s a back and forth element to it that I feel works really well and that I’m exceedingly excited about, but there’s also various people coming through during the story just to illustrate that life continues on as normal outside of the story.

I’m probably not explaining it all that well, but I haven’t had a lot of sleep, so I’m not exactly running on all cylinders at the moment.  Suffice it to say that I’m really excited about what I’m doing, and I think it’ll make for a great read.

As for my new year’s resolutions (since it’s January 1st today), I only have one.  This year I’m gonna sell some damn books finally!  How?  I’m actually gonna start advertising instead of spending all my time writing.  See, it’s funny how it all works.  If people don’t know your books exist, they don’t buy them.  I know…it’s crazy, right?  Still, that’s something I need to put a whole lot more focus on.  I always said I’d focus on advertising once I finished writing the series, but since I never seem to finish, I guess I’m just gonna have to make myself do it.

Anyway, happy new year everyone!  I’m gonna go and try to get some much needed sleep.  It’s a gym night, and I’m gonna have a crappy workout if I don’t.

Every book I’ve written so far up to the current one, nineteen books in all (working on the 20th), I designed the cover before I wrote the book.  The covers often gave me ideas for a scene, or would sort of steer me in a certain direction depending on what was depicted.  The one thing all the covers had in common, whether they led me in a certain direction, or they were symbolically representative of the overall story, was that without exception the rendering process would bring my computer to its knees.

Now I don’t have a top of the line computer.  It’s about five or six years old now, but it’s no slouch either.  The reason I never built a new one in all this time was because this one has been more than fast enough for games, programs or anything else I needed to do with it.  However, it only has four gig of RAM, and when you’re running 64-bit Windows 7 and have other stuff taking up memory in the background, that four gig becomes woefully inadequate for rendering complex three dimensional images.  The hard drive is in a state of constant swapping to the page file, so the computer itself slows down considerably.

Fed up with my lack of RAM in an otherwise still perfectly functional system, I recently ordered myself a 16GB (4×4) memory kit from Corsair.  My motherboard can handle a total of 16GB of DDR3 SDRAM, so I checked the specs on the memory I ordered and it was within the specs for the system.  I placed the order and waited extra time for it because of the Christmas holiday, and then on Saturday I think it was, it finally showed up on my doorstep.

Excited as all get out, I brought it into my computer room, shut down the computer, laid it on its side, opened it up and proceeded to remove the old memory.  After installing the new memory, I turned the system on, and what do you think happened?  Nothing.  Everything came on, but it wouldn’t post.  The screen just stayed blank.  There wasn’t even a beep code or anything.  So I started trying different things.  I tried each of the sticks individually to see if one of them was bad, and I tried different bios settings by putting in the old ones, changing the settings and then swapping the new ones back in.  The specs on the new memory were right for my system, as I said, but there was some sort of an incompatibility there that prevented them from working.

Finally, I had no choice but to give up and put the old memory back in.  I have a request in for an RMA number for the old memory, and I’m going to get charged a 15% restocking fee on it, which sucks, but it’s better than keeping memory I can’t use.

Doing some searching around, which is what I should have done in the first place, I found that a lot of people have had this problem with different motherboards and different brands of memory.  Then I did what I really should have done in the first place.  I typed in my motherboard’s brand and model number into Google, along with the words 16GB memory (4×4).  That gave me a link to the Crucial website where I found a 16GB kit of their Ballistix Tactical memory that was certified to work with my motherboard, and 100% guaranteed by the company to be compatible.  I ordered that instead and I’m hoping to have it by Thursday or so.

So what’s the point of all this?  The point is that I was holding off on doing the cover for this book until I got the new memory upgrade, which is something I’ve never done before, and I find it quite frustrating.  I have a very specific process I go through when I’m prepping for the next book, and designing the cover is a part of that process.  The fact that I’m three chapters into writing the next book already and I still haven’t designed the cover is sort of the equivalent of someone standing in front of you, tapping their finger over and over again on your forehead.  The longer it goes on, the more irritating it gets.  I just hope that new memory gets here before New Years, otherwise I’ll have to wait for the following week, which will piss me off to no end considering that I paid for three day shipping.

Anyway, that’s my 1st world problems story.  I’m just going to get back to finishing up chapter three now, and then I got some editing on someone else’s book I need to work on.  Fun. 😛

I just finished writing the first chapter of Invasion, and I’m absolutely loving how it’s going so far.  I’ve wanted to write about Jake and Lana’s story since I first introduced them in book 17 of the series, and now felt like the perfect time to do just that.  The form it’s taking is that Jake and Lana are sitting around bored with Jarrod, Derek, Tina and Sarah, and since they can’t figure out anything fun to do, Sarah asks them to tell them about all the stuff they went through during the invasion, and during the time after it was over.  I’m writing it as though it were happening, and then at the beginning of each chapter I think I’ll cut back to the present and have the others ask them some questions or make comments or whatever.  Sort of like if you were watching a movie or a television show and someone was telling someone else a story from their past, and after they interacted and the person started telling it, it would fade to showing the actual story.

Anyway, I haven’t made the cover for it yet.  Wanna know why?  Because I got sick of my computer being dragged to its knees every time I try to render a cover.  I literally can’t hardly do anything else while I have a render running because it’s swapping to the hard drive so much.  To that end, I ordered myself a Crucial 4×4 16GB memory kit that I’m gonna install.  It’s only got 4GB of ram in it now, which is why it’s swapping to the hard drive so bad during renders.  I’m hoping that having 16GB in there will alleviate that problem.  This is the first book that I haven’t made a cover for it before I started writing.  Quite often the cover will lead me in a certain direction, or make me think about a particular scene I want to include, and it’ll give me some visual cues for writing that scene, but it can’t be helped.  I’ve rendered 19 covers now and every one of them bogged the hell out of my computer.  This time around, I’m gonna take the luxury route.  Now…if the memory would just get here.  It’s supposed to be here by the 29th, but I’m hoping it’ll get here sooner.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that the next one is started and hopefully it won’t take anywhere near as long to get out as this last one did.

I forgot to mention when I posted the notice that Reapers had been published that I also updated the Trivia section with Reapers trivia, and I added a deleted part of a scene from chapter 9 in the Bonus Scenes section as well.

I’m very happy to announce that Reapers, book 19 of the Unseen Things series is now available!  It’s currently published or in the process of publishing on the following sites:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B019KW8BFE
Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B019KW8BFE
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/601754
Google Play: Coming soon.
OmniLit: https://www.omnilit.com/product-reapers-1951797-234.html
Official Site: http://www.duanelmartin.com/buy-the-books

Synopsis: When the reaper drones showed up at the party to kill Diedre so they could reclaim her energy and take it back to Purgatory, she and Logan had go on the run, hopping from dimension to dimension in an effort to try to stay one step ahead of them while the folks back home work on a way to rectify the situation without leaving all of the energy forms on Purgatory stranded there for all eternity.  In their search for answers however, they make some discoveries that explain a lot of things, including why Diedre was so psychotic in her previous life.

Also, when Derek pays himself a visit from the future, he learns that their attempts at finding a solution to the Diedre situation appeared to have worked at first, but things ended really bad for them shortly thereafter.  Now they have to think outside the box to come up with a new and unique way of solving the problem that they wouldn’t have otherwise considered if they’re to have any chance at all of altering the timeline, so the people they care about don’t end up dead.

Reapers is book 19 of the Unseen Things series.

Well, for some reason it took me almost three months to write this one.  Why’d it take so long?  Well, a lot of it had to do with some personal stuff I was dealing with, and I also had to edit a cookbook for our neighbor and get it ready for publication for her, so things sort of just kept getting in the way.  Tonight however, I finally managed to get it done, and I’ll start editing it tomorrow.  There will be one more book in the series, at least for now.  I may come back to it, but my plan is and has been to end it with book 20, which will mostly involve Jake and Lana’s story from a little before they met until they reached that town in Utah they were headed to at the beginning of Travelers.

The people in this series have become a second family to me, and as such I’ll never be able to truly say it’s done.  I know I’ll probably come back to it and write some more at some point, but I have another book that’s completely unrelated to the series that I want to write after the next one, and then we’ll see where that one goes.  Maybe it’ll become a series of its own, or maybe it’ll just be a standalone.  I really don’t know at this point, and I won’t know until I reach the end of it.  If I feel like it’s nothing more than a single story, then it’ll be a standalone.  If I feel like there’s more to tell with those characters, then I’ll continue on with it.

As for the characters in the Unseen Things universe…they’ll always live in my heart.  I’ve put so much into giving them life since I wrote the first book back in October of 2013, that I can’t even fathom writing a distinct and final ending for the series.  The thing is, after 19 books now, and soon a 20th, I need a little break.  I need some time to figure out where things will go in the future, or if they’ll continue on at all.  The way this latest book ends is different from the others in the series.  Most of the time there’s a little cliffhanger that leads you into the next book.  In this one, I just end it without a cliffhanger.  If this was the final book of the series, it would feel like an appropriate ending, and that’s how I’ll write the next one as well.  If the next one truly is the end, then I hope I’ll have left people satisfied.  If not, then hopefully I’ll have left them wanting more so they’ll continue this journey with me.  In any case, whatever the future holds, I’ll be eternally grateful that I’ve been a part of this universe, and a part of my characters’ lives.  They represent things to me that I often find lacking in humanity.  Things like honor, friendship, loyalty, love and a sense of family.  They give me hope, and they’ve given me something that no one else could – a sense of purpose.

Anyway, I’ll get started on the editing tomorrow.  Usually it takes me from four to seven days to do the editing, and then I’ll get it published.  After I finish writing the next one, which will be called Invasion by the way, I’m going to focus some of my time and effort into getting things reformatted and published on Createspace, so I’ll be able to make hard copies available as well as the e-books.  That will be a slow process, but I’ll start with the first one and get through them one at a time until they’re all available in print form.  For right now though, I just need to focus on what’s in front of me, which is a very tedious editing process that I very rarely enjoy.