I had been putting off writing the book to go between the already completed volumes three and five of Senta and the Steel Dragon.  But at the end of 2011, I finally started.  I varied the formula a bit from previous books.  Instead of following a single character for an entire chapter, I flipped back and forth within a chapter.  The result was that I went wildly off my outline, and by the time I was done, I was exhausted and not very pleased with the final product.  Going back and reading The Young Sorceress though, I like it better than I thought I did.

Once The Young Sorceress was done, I revised the long-finished The Two Dragons.  I changed very little except for the final chapter which was entirely rewritten, and the long epilog I had originally written was removed.  I had decided by this time that I might want to continue the series at a later date, so the epilog had to go.

By the time I finished these two Senta books, I was feeling quite heavy.  I thought I would write something light. I dusted off my manuscript of The Jungle Girl and wrote several new chapters.  I even created a new cover for it.  Then I just became unhappy with it.  I went back and changed it from a first person story to a third person narrative, but in the end, I put it back in the proverbial drawer.

I had long thought about writing another Eaglethorpe Buxton story.  I started in on Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Queen of Aerithraine, which is kind of a continuation of the two previous stories.  By the time I was done, I had not only thought of two more stories, but I decided to publish them all together as a five book set.  The Many Adventures of Eaglethorpe Buxton was published just before Christmas.

I knew that if any of my books was likely to capture attention, it would be His Robot Wife. His Robot Girlfriend was being downloaded by the thousands each month, despite not being my best work. So I really worked to finish a book that was much better written than the original. I also for the first time had letters from over a hundred people who had questions or suggestions about a sequel to His Robot Girlfriend. That was pretty strange– that kind of feedback was definitely new to me. I spent the end of 2010, and the beginning of 2011 finishing it.  I hoped that by the end of the year it would have sold 8,000.  The sales were a little short of that– just over 4800.

One of the fun things that I noticed at the beginning of the ebook revolution was that people were making and publishing their own superhero stories in series form.  They created covers for them and used existing DC and Marvel heroes.  I thought I would try my hand at it, but wanted to create my own characters.  I wrote the first two chapters and posted them on Feedbooks in 2008, but stopped as I got busy with other projects.  Then in 2011, I picked them up and turned the story into a novella, which I finished and published.  Women of Power was a play on the term “women of color” which was in the news a lot at the time.  Women of Power was a lot of fun to write.

I had been meeting every two weeks with my writers group.  At the time, we met at Borders.  They set up a table for us in the corner of the store.  Then one day, they moved us to between two massive counters of vampire novels.  One of the members suggested I write a vampire story.  I said that my type of vampire story wouldn’t sell.  The more I thought about it though, the more I wanted to write it.  I started on Blood Trade and got more and more dark as I went.  About halfway through, I went back to the beginning and just went totally dark.  And as I predicted, it doesn’t sell.

I finished Blood Trade and wasn’t quite ready to jump back into Senta and the Steel Dragon, so I was looking around for something to write.  I was telling someone that Princess of Amathar was based on the Burroughs books that I loved.  Then I mentioned that before them, I was reading Tom Swift Jr.  I thought I should write my own books like that.  I sat down and thought about all the things I loved about Tom Swift and all the things I didn’t like about the stories.  Then I plotted out the characters and came up with about twenty possible story lines.  Astrid Maxxim was born.  I sat down and wrote Astrid Maxxim and her Amazing Hoverbike in almost no time at all.  I hired Matthew Riggenbach at Shaed  Studios to create a cover (Astrid Maxxim books are the only covers I haven’t done myself).

Finally, I couldn’t put it off any longer.  I got back to Senta and the Steel Dragon

By 2010, I had mostly given up on traditionally publishing the Senta and the Steel Dragon books. I entered the Voyage of the Minotaur in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest, and though it made it to round two, it was very disappointing. I was very unhappy with the feedback I got from the publishers who were evaluating the books for that contest. Some of the criticism was valid, but some I felt was very mean and some was just incorrect.

I decided to publish it myself and did. I also decided that Senta and the Steel Dragon shouldn’t just be a trilogy, but a series. The three books I had written (as one long one) took place three to five years apart. I thought I should write books to fill in the void. So my original three books became:

Senta and the Steel Dragon Book 1: The Voyage of the Minotaur
Senta and the Steel Dragon Book 3: The Drache Girl
Senta and the Steel Dragon Book 5: The Two Dragons.

The titles were fairly easy.  The Voyage of the Minotaur is exactly what most of that book is about.  It’s also a bit of a tribute to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  Likewise, The Two Dragons featured two dragons, and was a bit of a tribute to The Two Towers.  Of course, when I later revised it, I added a dragon so there are more than two dragons in the book.  But then, there are more than two towers in The Two Towers.  The hardest title was the middle book.  For a long time, it was The Sorceress’s Apprentice, but my wife thought it might be confused with The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.  I like The Drache Girl as a title, but I might reuse the original in a later book.

I sat down and wrote Senta and the Steel Dragon Book 2: The Dark and Forbidding Land. It was a real challenge making it fit between two already completed books, but I think it worked well.  It is one of my favorite books I’ve written.

I finished it and published book 2, then revised book 3 again and published it.

I also decided that I would write a quick and short little prequel and so Senta and the Steel Dragon Book 0: Brechalon, was done.

I started in on a book very much in the vein of Edgar Rice Burroughs called The Jungle Girl.  I got about a fourth of the way in and just lost focus.

In the meantime, I was playing a lot of Rock Band on my Wii. This inspired a story that just popped right out of me, seemingly without much effort on my part. It became Tesla’s Stepdaughters.  Originally the band in the story was named Tesla’s Stepdaughters.  I later changed it to The Ladybugs, so I had to come up with something to explain the title, so Tesla’s Stepdaughters became a song The Ladybugs sing.

So, I had five books published in 2010, and I started having visions of dozens of Wesley Allison books or even scores. It was then that I created a new goal for myself: write as many books as Edgar Rice Burroughs before I die.  23 Down, 61 to go.

I spent the last part of the year working on His Robot Wife, a book that I had high hopes would sell well, due to the popularity of His Robot Girlfriend.

It was about here that I really decided I wanted to be a writer, I guess. Or maybe I decided that it was actually possible.  I had published His Robot Girlfriend as a free ebook, and I put out Princess of Amathar as an ebook.  I was an author.

I realized that The Steel Dragon was way to big to ever be accepted by a publisher, so I split it into it’s three parts and sent them off, trying to get them published as a trilogy. The rejection slips started pouring in.

I was speding so much time sending out letters and queries that I didn’t have too much time to write, but I wanted to write something, so I made up a little story, inspired a bit by Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events. I really liked how the character of Lemony Snicket was part of the story, even though he didn’t appear to be.  I set my story in the fantasy world I had created to play Dungeons and Dragons with my kids.  The same world that I had written a play set in, performed by the thespians at Brown JHS.  Thus Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Elven Princess was created. I had so much fun that I wrote Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Sorceress, based on the aforementioned play.

In 2008, I finished my huge steampunk book, which I called “The Steel Dragon.” It was just shy of 1000 pages long, about 375,000 words. I printed up 10 copies and gave them to friends and colleagues over the summer to help me revise and edit.

In the meantime, I taught summer school for the first time that year, teaching 11th grade U.S. History. It was a great deal of fun, mostly because my son John was in my class.  We would go to school each day, complete out 6 hours, and then stop by someplace for lunch on the way home.

That year, I also discovered ebooks for the first time. Some friends urged me to get something written to get my name out there, so I took some of my sci-fi flash fiction, mashed it together, rewrote it, and wrote an ending for it. This became His Robot Girlfriend. I posted it on Feedbooks and then Smashwords.