Monthly Archives: July 2012

The Young Sorceress and The Two Dragons Now at Sony & iBooks

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Well, it’s taken a while, but The Young Sorceress and The Two Dragons have finally found their way into the Sony ebook Store.  You can find a link to all my books for the Sony Reader here.

In a related event, The Two Dragons has finally arrived at Apple’s iBook Store.  You can find a link to it here.  I am especially happy about this because Apple has been my single biggest retailer for most of my books, and especially for Senta and the Steel Dragon.

If you are a Sony Reader reader 🙂 and you were waiting to complete your series, now you can.  And thanks to all of you who purchased my books.

More Motivations: Brechalon and The Voyage of the Minotaur

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A few weeks ago, when I was talking about my inspirations for The Voyage of the Minotaur and Brechalon, I forgot one– an important one.  One of my biggest inspirations was the movie “Zulu” staring Michael Caine and Stanley Baker.  This great movie was particularly evocative for me when I wrote the battle scenes at the end of The Voyage of the Minotuar.  I played the theme music while I wrote.  I think Terrence and Augie Dechantagne owe a bit to Stanley Baker and Michael Caine respectively.

I gave a major hint in Brechalon about my inspiration, as one of the characters is Colour Sgt. Bourne.  Another Colour Sgt. Bourne plays an important part in Zulu and the calling of his name is one of the most often repeated bits of dialog.  Second only perhaps to “fire at will.”

Misc.

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I just got back from three days of fun in California.  My wife and both kids and I rarely get together all that often, but we spent two days at the beach and one at Knott’s Berry Farm and had a great time.

Just before I left, my beloved iPhone went all wonky on me.  I’m getting it replaced as we speak, since it’s still in warrenty.  I’ll let you know how that goes.

I’m just about to get my quarterly royalty check and am looking forward to replacing my iPad 1 with an iPad 3 (aka The New iPad).  This will be especially pleasing, since my last two quarterly checks went entirely to Uncle Sam, as he was of the opinion that I owed him more taxes.

His Robot Wife just sold its 8,000th copy.  It might not be a really major milestone, but it’s pretty cool to me.  I can’t wait till it hits 10,000.  Sales have slowed, but its still my best-seller– averaging about 400 per month for the past year.

Motivations: Women of Power

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Once again, this is the new cover for Women of Power which graces the updated version.

I got the idea for Women of Power from Feedbooks.com.  Feedbooks was one of the early sites to get great ebook downloads (though I think it has suffered a bit since they went commercial).  One of the great things among their original books back in 2009 (that lately seem to be all erotica) were fan-fiction commics– mini books with comic book covers that were prose inside.  They were mostly based on DC characters like Batman and The Teen Titans.  I decided to try my hand at writing one of those.

There was a whole club and web organization which assigned which books each writer was working on.  That seemed like a whole lot of trouble to me.  Plus I just like to go with my own characters, so that’s what I did.  I made up All American Girl and Skygirl and patterned their descriptions after some cover art I purchased for the “comics.”  I wrote and posted the first two “issues,” but by the time I had finished “issue” (read chapter) three.  I decided that I wanted to make it a full novella.  I set it aside and didn’t get back to it for two years.

You can still find issue 1 of Women of Power at Feedbooks as a free download.  I took issue 2 down because it was significantly different than what became chapter two in the book, and I didn’t want people reading the former and then jumping into chapter 3 of the latter and getting lost.

On a side note, my son and I have just plotted a sequel to Women of Power, with some ideas that I just love.  I really want him to write it with me, because otherwise it may be a while until I get to it.  If that’s the way it turns out, it will be my first co-written work.

Motivations: His Robot Wife

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His Robot Wife was written for entirely different reasons than any other book I’ve written.  All the other books (with maybe the exception of His Robot Girlfriend) were written because I thought I had a great story to tell and I wanted to tell it.  You could say that I wrote His Robot Wife for money, though that’s not entirely accurate.  I priced it an 99 cents even though I could have made more by pricing it higher.  I wrote it because I knew it would sell.

I publish His Robot Girlfriend in 2008, and it has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.  Many people wrote and asked for a sequel.  This was a big deal for me.  But I didn’t have a story.  As far as I was concerned, the story of Mike and Patience was over.  Still, people kept asking.  It took me three years to come up with a story for them, and I think it’s probably my weakest plot (but HRG wasn’t popular for its plot, but rather its characters anyway).  So in 2011 I wrote His Robot Wife.  It is short, at 28,000 words, but it went easily enough, and as it turned out, it has sold more copies than all my other books put together.

People still wanted another book in the series, but I really struggled to come up with an idea.  Then one night, it just popped into my head.  If I took the point of view away from Mike and gave it to Patience, a whole series of story ideas presented themselves.  I sat down and plotted out five books.

I spent some time writing the new book last night.  It’s not as easy to write as some other books in my workshop, but I’m having a bit of fun.  Now for those of you who bothered to read to the end… here is a little hint about something in the next book.

Patience acts as a mentor to another Daffodil, teaching her how to seem more human.  Talk about the blind leading the blind.

 

Motivations: The Dark and Forbidding Land

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The Dark and Forbidding Land was the first of two books that I squeezed between the events that happened in the original outline of Senta and the Steel Dragon, the other being The Young Sorceress.  I enjoyed writing TDAFL and I think it works well.  Part of that was because writing about Senta as a pre-teen was my favorite part of writing the entire series.

One of the challenges of writing this book was not to top the events in The Drache Girl.  I didn’t want Senta aged 10 to be more powerful and experienced than Senta aged 12.  Remember Star Wars, where we watch R2-D2 trudge around in the desert in episode 4, only to find out in episode 1, that he could fly.

The other challenge that I had was that I knew there were going to be characters who were going to die, based on my single book outline.  But I was limited in which characters I could kill, because some of them appeared in The Drache Girl and The Two Dragons which were already written.  So I sat down and created a whole pack of characters who, unbeknownst to them, were doomed.  The down side of this was that I ended up liking several of them and was sorry to see them go.  Not all of them ended up dying.  So, there are a couple of characters who appear only in books 2 and 4.

I haven’t read The Dark and Forbidding Land in a while, so I have to go back and take a look.  My son though, tells me it is his favorite book in the series.

Motivations: The Young Sorceress

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The Young Sorceress was the last part of the Senta and the Steel Dragon series that I wrote.  As I had mentioned before, the series was originally three books, that became books 1, 3, and 5.  I decided to split them up and I decided that I would add two books to fill in the space between.  If I had to do it again, I would have not tried to add these two books, although I think The Dark and Forbidding Land came out quite well.

The idea behind The Young Sorceress was to take Senta from the happy pre-teen that she is in The Drache Girl to the sorceress that everyone fears in The Two Dragons.  I also experimented with the idea of multiple characters across each chapter– something I did in Brechalon.  I’ve decided I don’t really like that format much.  This book originally had a much larger scope when I outlined it, but I became so weary with writing in this world that unnecessary parts started dropping off, until I had a relatively short book.  On the plus side, this is one of my favorite covers.

Motivations: The Drache Girl

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The Drache Girl was originally the second part of the three part novel I wrote in 2007-2008.  While I was writing it, it was known as “Colony.”  It takes place a little over three years after the events in what became The Voyage of the Minotaur.  When I was done, I decided to call it The Sorceress’s Apprentice, but ultimately changed that title to the current one.  I don’t know if that was the best decision or not.  I wanted to be more original, but the other might have caught more readers’ eyes.

As I mentioned before, this book was inspired by Lord of the Rings, Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, James Michener’s Hawaii, and the movie Zulu.  The idea was to create a fantasy world mirroring British colonial imperialism.  This part of the story also owes something to British TV series “Hamish MacBeth,” and if you’ve seen that series, you’ll recognize Hamish in the character and trappings of PC Saba Colbshallow.

I enjoyed writing The Drache Girl probably more than any other book I’ve written.  I really enjoyed the characters at this point in the story– especially Senta and her friends and Saba Colbshallow. It ended up taking me a looong time to publish because I decided ultimately that there needed to be another book between The Voyage of the Minotaur and The Drache Girl.

Indy Author Gets Book Deal

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Indy Author Jamie McGuire has landed a book deal with Simon & Schuster.  She has previously done quite well self-publishing her books and this is a real trend of indy authors being discovered by publishers.  Hopefully this will mark a great career move for her.

Read the story here.

Part of what stories like this indicate is that the old model of the publisher as the gatekeeper  is broken– resulting in way too few new Shakespeares and way too many new Snookies.  Way to wake up Simon & Schuster.

Double Down by Vicki De Leo

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My friend and fellow writing group member Vicki De Leo has recently published Double Down.  I was happy to have played a very small part in her writing process by throwing in my two cents during our group readings.  Here is the description.

Valerie Peterson, Director of Human Resources for the Royal Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, is called back to work one night when security finds one of her employees murdered in her office. She discovers that before she died, the woman she knew as Monica, managed to institute a blackmail scheme in which she implicated Valerie as a co-conspirator.
While her career spirals out of control, her love life heats up. Still bruised from a disastrous first marriage, Valerie finds herself torn between the safety and comfort she feels in one man’s arms and the passion she feels for another.
When her home is burglarized, and her life threatened, she must accept that someone thinks she knows something worth killing for, possibly someone she works with every day, forcing her to reexamine the motives of everyone around her.
To complicate the matter further, the police arrest the one person Valerie is sure couldn’t have committed the murder. Her job and her life in jeopardy, Valerie decides to dig into Monica’s past hoping to find some clue to unmask the real killer.

Follow this link to find the ebook on Smashwords.