Bladesmen Lords trilogy available at Smashwords

I've made the Bladesmen Lords trilogy available at Smashwords.com for all three novels: Lord of the City, City of the Lords, and Worlds of the Lords. They're available there with a sample download of the first 20% of each novel if you'd like to try them out!

Worlds of the Lords now available to order

I'm pleased to announce that Worlds of the Lords is now available for ordering!

Worlds of the Lords: published October, 2014. Volume 3 of the Bladesmen Lords series. ISBN 978-1502456854. Buy now as a trade paperback from CreateSpace, a Kobo ebook, or as a Kindle ebook!

Events and Distribution

First off, I wanted to say that I greatly enjoyed the signing that Debbie and Jody graciously put on for myself and Giando Sigurani this past Saturday out at Jan's Paperbacks. Thanks! I had a lot of fun chatting with the bookstore staff and the customers who came out on a somewhat damp day.

So... what's next for Worlds of the Lords? I still have a lot of work to do! I need to get the eBook versions (Kobo, Kindle, Nook, etc.) cleaned up and set for distribution alongside the other two books in the series. I need to order more books and get some sent out that have been requested as signed copies. Last but far from least now that the trilogy is complete I need to take another crack at setting it up on a bigger distribution network (Ingram Spark) which is easier for bookstores to order from directly. That makes it a much better deal for larger and smaller bookstores alike (from Powell's on down) to make space for it.

Proof copy of Worlds of the Lords!

I got a present in the mail yesterday:

After a quick review and flip through, I resubmitted the cover (I brightened up the image and shifted everything down a little) and ordered my first batch of copies for the book signing!

Worlds of the Lords is ready!

I am pleased to announce that I've ordered proof copies of Worlds of the Lords, the third novel in the Bladesmen Lords series. It's exciting to complete the trilogy with what I hope is a satisfying story for everyone who enjoyed the first two novels.

The first physical copies will be available in a book signing I'll be doing at Jan's Paperbacks in Aloha, Oregon on Saturday October 18 from 1:30pm to 4:30pm. Join us and get your copy signed while browsing an excellent selection of new and used books. I will have all three novels there available for purchase. If you're struggling to decide on a present this holiday season for someone you know who enjoys fantasy novels, the trilogy would make an excellent addition to their bookshelves!

Schedule locked in for the third Bladesman Lords book!

Manuscript editing is finished, the book cover is lined up for a delivery date, and I'm getting feedback from the people I passed the final copy out to. I will be ordering proofs of the next title by October 1 from the printer, and should have printings of the final product in my hands by October 15th. It will have been almost exactly a year and a half since City of the Lords was released - far longer than I would have preferred, but I like to think that my busy day job and a summer wedding are pretty good excuses for the delay.

I wanted to give special recognition to Sharri Jeffery, a customer at Jan's Paperbacks (a local bookstore) who has come out for every signing I've done there. Since she first read Lord of the City she has eagerly asked when each new installment in the series is coming out, and despite some health problems keeps hanging on waiting for the next book to arrive (whether it's mine or someone else's). An author could hope for no more inspiring a fan than that. To paraphrase her words, she refuses to pass on while there's still that next book in the series waiting for her! Thanks, Sharri, and may you read not only my next book but plenty of others in the years to come!

Out-loud editing

I'm pretty much finished with my second round of edits for the third Bladesman Lords manuscript and wanted to talk about how it works and why I do it this way.

Once I finish a final readthrough of a manuscript and make whatever corrections I can on the screen, I print everything out in hard copy and go through the entire thing out loud (or at least whispered/mouthed). I picked this step up based on advice I read on another blog (sadly, I have long forgotten which one) back when working on Lord of the City and it can be astonishing how much it reveals.

Here's the kinds of things I recognize during this step -

1. Some sentences just don't "sound right" when spoken. The words don't flow well, the syllables get mixed up, or a certain sound might get repeated in an unpleasant way. The muscle memory of our spoken language triggers different perspectives than simply reading words on a screen. Should my books ever get turned into audiobooks, there's a lot of potential ugliness there which can get detected at this stage.

2. Typing and editing in the trade paperback format that I use causes me to miss some repeated words or overused phrases that might not happen to be on the same page. Printing and editing in a different format helps bring these to light.

3. This is the first chance I've had to sit back with the text away from a computer screen. I have an opportunity to read it in a different frame of mind and a different physical stance than I do while writing it or during the initial rounds of editing. Subtle problems can be brought to light which weren't seen on a screen.

This process takes me about 10-15 minutes a chapter, during which I mark up the manuscript I've printed out. My next step is typing up corrections to the items I find, which may range from typos/extra spaces to entire new paragraphs to better explain an idea or rewrites of sentences or scenes based on problems. That step ends up being pretty short, all things told, just a couple of days worth of work. For reference, this third book is 47 chapters long (in three parts just like City of the Lords was), so the full out-loud manuscript readthrough has taken me between 9 and 10 hours.

What's the next step? Distributing my final draft to friends and family to read through. I'll give them a week or two to come back with suggestions after which I'll make changes (if any). The cover should be done by then. Everything is on target to have a proof coming from the printers in the first week of October, and if things work out right I'll have physical copies sitting in my hands within a month of today.

Book 3 Progress and more!

The summer has been a busy one! It's gone by in a flash, consumed with writing and wedding preparations. The third book in the Bladesman Lords series has a completed rough draft manuscript in front of me, and I've started the last round of edits reading through the entire thing out loud. The cover art is being worked on by the excellent Jeremy Gregory, the same artist who worked on the first two for me. Great progress and I'm on track to release the book this fall!

In more exciting news, I was asked to be the featured author in the newsletter for Jan's Paperbacks this month. I submitted a short article on my thoughts about how we all need variety in our lives and sometimes it's good for us to push beyond what's familiar. Check the newsletter out here: http://eepurl.com/Zritf - it looks like the link hasn't been updated yet but it should be soon.

Holidays approaching!

The November Kobo eBook promotion went well - thanks to everyone who participated! Reviews at Goodreads for Lord of the City or City of the Lords are always appreciated, no matter which method you've chosen to read them.

I greatly enjoyed the events in November, both the Reader Party and the signing at Jan's with fellow local author Moses Soloman. Chatting with readers and authors is always fun; feedback is crucial to shape the way I write moving forward.

Speaking of writing, Book 3 of the Bladesmen Lords continues to progress (though slower than I would like, of course). I'm just about done with Part 1. As with City of the Lords, the book will end up divided into three sections with clear divisions between each part. As I approach the end of the first part, unfortunately, I've realized that I need to make some significant changes to Part 2 and thus I'm back to outline work there. That's a good thing and I feel certain it will result in a stronger story, though it will slow the writing process down a little bit.

I hope everyone enjoys the last few weeks of 2013. I'm looking forward to 2014 and publishing the next entry in the Bladesmen Lords series!

Organization

When I started jotting down ideas for stories many years ago I didn't have a lot of foresight in the way of organization. Even today those ideas are stored in a batch of electronic documents with seemingly unrelated titles, lumped together only in a 'stories' directory. Some I can remember just by glancing at the name of the document, but most I need to open up and scan through to remember what they were about. Some have nothing more than a half-page of notes, others have 10,000 or more words and the start of a real structure.

Since I started publishing I've become much better about organization. The Bladesmen Lords series has plenty of artifacts related to it now, from promo posters to original pictures of the cover art to the stories themselves in various formats and drafts. Partway through writing City of the Lords I organized all of this better instead of throwing it all in a single directory and trying to remember what belonged to what. The third book - which is progressing well, by the way - is set up alongside the other two but separate so I can keep its assets properly catalogued.

I've lost a lot of hard drives over the years, and I sorely miss a batch of story ideas that disappeared over a decade ago. They're gone now, but I remember enough bits and fragments that I wish I'd properly backed them up. I know better now, and keep copies of all my latest works spread through several areas both within and without the house. That doesn't help the organization - it's easy for things to get out of sync - but it keeps ideas from getting lost.

Start organizing early! Someday I need to spend a few days and go through all of those old ideas to retitle them, group them where appropriate, and make sure I can get to them easily. Don't wait as long as I did.

Starting in on Book 3 of the Bladesmen Lords!

I came back from a short vacation and was able to finally figure out some of the things that have kept me from starting in on Book 3 of the Bladesmen Lords series. Specifically it was the point of view of the first part of the book - there were two "candidates" who would each have been able to witness the necessary portions of the outline that I'd written, but each one was going to give a very different take on the events and I'd been struggling for some time as to which one to write as. It came together on the ten hour drive home yesterday, though, and I'm off to the races! Chapter 1 is written. In an example of how things go for me when I have a good outline to write from and some time to think about it, the chapter is about 2700 words (approximately 8 pages in my usual format; I try to keep chapters between 5 and 11 pages long) and took about an hour to write.

With approximately 35 - 40 chapters outlined, if the book ended up being exactly what I've laid out so far it would end up right around 100,000 words - a bit shorter than Lord of the City. Since I haven't outlined the whole thing that I have in mind, I'm (very) tentatively expecting it to end up about the length of City of the Lords, though I could be wildly off base in that - things never go where I expect them to while I'm writing.

Time to start on a new one!

After finishing a writing project, I always need some time to let my mind wander around without focusing on any specific topic. This is the time where I come up with new ideas, review old ones, and sometimes throw a few words at different stories to see if any stick without really planning on doing anything about them.

It's been a few months since City of the Lords was published, and in the last week or two my creative mind has started itching again. There's a story that I've been thinking about for a year or so and working on here and there, but after much review I determined that that one's not quite ready to be finished. I went through my collected backlog of old story ideas and found one that I'd put about 20,000 words into. It's pretty good, actually, and I really like the idea. But the writing is from several years ago and is not what I'd consider up to spec now, so those 20,000 words would take a lot of rewriting.

Last but not least, of course, is the fact that the Bladesmen Lords story is not yet finished. I had one reader who sounded a bit disappointed when I told her that I was considering working on something else next, and the next book keeps bouncing around in my head. Today I opened up a fresh new document and after reviewing some pertinent information on City of the Lords began an outline on the third book. It's very high level at this point and barely scratches the beginning, but it's a start.