A reminder that The Mountain Throne will be featured in Kirkus Reviews‘ Indie Books Worth Discovering in a few weeks. I have to say so now because the day job calls and I will be mostly indisposed overseas for the next few months. Internet connectivity will exist, more or less, but I can expect long and busy days and so my usual periodic updates will probably not continue.

I do promise to put what spare time I have into Book II!

And something I’ve been pondering… people I’ve spoken to in person have been very interested in hearing how I write, what it’s like to self-publish, and what I think about the craft of writing. On the assumption that there are others out there who might be interested, I am thinking about putting up blog posts here on those topics.

One might expect I’d do little work through the holiday season. It’s a time of merriment and social niceties and parties and such, yeah?

Not me! I labored. In addition to a significant re-write of the roadmap/synopsis of the second half of the book (fixing some screwy chronologies, mostly, but also updating notes that haven’t been looked at in more than a year), I have finished Chapters 8 and 9 and am halfway done with 10. That means Book II is more than halfway done. 55% or so.

This isn’t a fast pace by any means, but for a guy who does this part time it’s not bad. Especially compared to how long it took The Mountain Throne to be finished. One thing is for sure, my first drafts come better and faster than they used to. I re-wrote the prologue to TMT something like six times…

Oh, and the good news is that The Mountain Throne was selected for inclusion in Kirkus Reviews 2019 edition of “Indie Titles Worth Discovering.” That should come out in early March. And who knows, maybe it will actually be discovered. I am occasionally told it would make for a good television series, and even by people who haven’t seen that cool fan-made ‘book trailer.’

I did good work while traveling in Japan… right up until my laptop died. After a few weeks in the shop, it’s back and I can finally write again. Unfortunate setback, but it could have been worse. You don’t want to muck around with faulty power and sensitive DC electronics.

Createspace has finalized its union with Kindle Direct Publishing, so hard copies of The Mountain Throne are now available through KDP. I also requested implementation of the X-Ray feature for my Kindle releases. This puts hyperlinks into the book at certain terms, allowing readers to check reference and past mention of words. As a heads up, I have no control over this; it’s a service they do themselves and I authorized because I was told by Kindle readers how useful they found it in fantasy novels. I hope it works out well for you!

It’s been a busy summer. I’ve moved for a new job which entails a lot of travel, but still found some time to write. Seven chapters of the second book are ‘complete’ (scare quotes because revision is always possible). I’m in the middle of Ch. 8, but want to hash out some chronology/plot issues before moving further forward.

A problem of multiple character perspectives is that the writing has to match up chronologically or the reader is confused. If you plan it all ahead of time but then want to change something in the middle of writing, you have to re-balance everything and make sure it still makes sense. That’s where I am. After beginning the chapter, I decided a re-write with another scene/chapter split was appropriate, and needed to re-do the perspective rotation. It’s a pain, but it did give me an opportunity to slide in another chapter I cut during a previous balancing. So that’s nice.

This book will almost definitely be longer than the first. In The Mountain Throne, a protagonist’s (Leasha’s) chapters were fairly short. One was only a single scene. That won’t be the case here. There will also be more chapters. The first book had 14 and this one will be more like 18.

I’m usually reticent to share details of unfinished work, but I think I’ll leave something here as a reward to those who actually read this blog. It’s the art (by Luis Royo) that inspired one of the new characters. Now, this isn’t how the character actually is. How boring would that be if I just took a piece of art straight? But it’s a cool piece that directly inspired the new character’s looks and attitude.

I like it.