Brechalon

I was still sending out The Steel Dragon to publishers, though by this time I had decided it should be three books instead of one.  I entered the first part, The Voyage of the Minotaur, into the Amazon Novel Contest and it made it to the second round.  In the meantime, I thought I would write a little story to promote the characters and setting.  By the time I was done with Brechalon, I had put so much work into the story that it seemed a shame to give it away rather than sell it.  I put it up for sale as a 99-cent ebook, but there was very little interest in it, so in the end, I went back to my original idea to offer it for free.

The Voyage of the Minotaur

By the time I was done with Brechalon, I had received quite a few rejection letters for The Voyage of the Minotaur.  I realized that even if the story was great (and I thought it was pretty good) it had too small an audience for any publisher to be interested.  At the same time, I was selling a few ebooks of Princess of Amathar.  I decided I would publish the manuscript myself as an ebook, but by that time I had fallen in love with the characters and setting and decided that I wanted to write more.  So only the first part of the original Steel Dragon manuscript was published. The other two parts would become books three and five of a series.

Tesla’s Stepdaughters

While trying to get The Voyage of the Minotaur published, and writing Brechalon, I had been playing Rock Band with my kids on the Wii.  In Rock Band, you can create your own characters, which I did—four hot babes, and you can unlock different outfits for them.  As I was playing, I unlocked some steampunk goggles, and a story started forming in my head.  By the time I started writing, the story was essentially complete in my brain. The only change really was that Tesla’s Stepdaughters was originally the name of the group.  I’ve always been a huge Beatles fan and based much of my fictional band’s career on them, so they became The Ladybugs.  I had never really attempted a detective story before.  They aren’t my usual read, though I have enjoyed a few. I was happy with how it came off.