Bull and the Goblin Raid

Surprise! I wrote another book!

I wasn’t planning on releasing a book so quickly after The Emerald Gate, but fate forced my hand. I’ve had Bull and the Goblin Raid ready to go for some time now, but was going to wait and give some spacing between it and The Emerald Gate. I also wanted to work on the sequel to Bull as it is a serialized novel and I want to publish on a fairly rapid pace. However, the Self Published Fantasy Blog Off just announced that they opening for entries next Saturday, and I can’t miss this opportunity. SPFBO is a fantastic writing contest for self-published authors.

I am extremely excited about Bull and the Goblin Raid. It is based in the same world as my The Orb novels, but is set 500 years later. Hadde, Ayja, Telea, Nidon, and the others are historical figures to the characters in Bull. You don’t have to have read any of my other novels in order to read Bull.

Bull and the Goblin Raid is different from how I’ve written before in a couple of ways. Bull is written in the first person. I can’t express how much I enjoyed writing in the first person. It was a fantastic, refreshing way to tell a story. The voice of Bull is unlike anything I’ve ever written. Bull and the Goblin Raid is also a short novel. It is 44,000 words long. Eternal Knight was 115,000 and The Dromost Gate was 200,000 by comparison. 40,000 words is really the minimum length you can write and still call a book a novel. By the way, Bull is only available as an ebook. Once I’ve written four Bull books, I’ll bundle them and turn them into a paperback.

The premise of the Bull novels is that an aged warrior who has come to The Green Wyvern Inn to tell the story of his life. Each night Bull will return to tell a little more of his life’s story. Each book of the series is another night of storytelling. Bull and the Goblin Raid tells the tale of his life up until Bull is seventeen and his life is turned upside down my a major life event.

The event may, or may not, be a goblin raid.

I hope you check it out. I am so excited for this book. And if you enjoy it, please leave a review on your favorite bookseller’s website. Reviews are hugely important for independent authors.

Release Day!

Release Day!

Today I'm celebrating the official release of The Emerald Gate. The Emerald Gate is the fifth (and final) book of The Orb fantasy series.

To make it extra special, I've discounted the ebook of Eternal Knight (book one) to free and Child of the Knight (book two) to $.99.

It's been a long journey. I started writing Eternal Knight in 1988! It's an amazing, wonderful feeling to complete something that's been a part of my life for such a long time.

The Orb might be drawing to a close, but I have more books on the way in the very near future. If you haven't read my books, this is a perfect opportunity to start!

Enjoy!

Emerald Gate Countdown

As the new year rolled around I decided I needed to make some changes. Writing had to take a higher priority and goofing off had to be moved down the list. It didn't hurt that I'd just started writing Bull and the Goblin Raid (more about that in a later post) and was loving it. Writing in the first person was a fun, refreshing change. So I said goodbye to my spaceships in EVE Online and said hello to Scrivener (writing software). 

Part of my transformation involved getting back to my habit of tracking my work on spreadsheets.

I love my spreadsheets. They keep me motivated and on track. For this one I added an "Hours Editing" column and for my "Adjusted Average" word count calculation I counted one hour of editing, proofreading, and other book work as 500 words written. I'm trying to keep the Adjusted Average over 1,000 words per day.

A lot of my time has been spent on Bull and the Iron Band, book two in The Green Wyvern series I've just started. While I've been writing my new series, The Emerald Gate has been out with my beta readers and editors.

We're in the homestretch now. The final copies of The Emerald Gate have been sent out to the publishers and are available for pre-order now. The actual release date is April 23rd. It's just a little more than a week away.

I'm very excited for the publication of The Emerald Gate. It is the last book of The Orb and represents the end of a writing adventure that began my sophomore year in college over twenty years ago. No, not the end of all my writing! I have a lot of stories left to tell. It's the end of a major odyssey, though. I've written a complete, five novel, epic fantasy series. It feels good.