As some of you might remember, a while back I was interviewed by Darrell Pitt for his blog, Writing and Life. Well, after compiling many an interview, Darrell decided that it would be a good idea to compile an eBook of what he considered his best interviews. The good news is: I made the cut, and am included in the eBook. The even better news? The eBook is free!

The book contains talk with a whole batch of really interesting folks talking about both the business and the craft of writing, from people like me who are just starting to be recognized to people who are pretty famous in their respective areas. It’s a great collection of information if you’re an aspiring author or just interested in the world of writing.

Check it out: Secrets of Succesful Authors by Darrel Pitt on Smashwords

Well, it took quite a lot of hard work and many long nights, but the first draft of The Children of the Sun, the final book in the II AM Trilogy, is now complete. The whole story is laid out, and everything came together pretty well. I’ve been waiting to write the closing epilogue for several years, and it feels good to finally have the words out on the screen. Now to begin the long and arduous process of taking the first draft and turning it into something worth publishing!

The Children of the Sun is the longest single work I’ve ever written, by a fairly wide margin, weighing in at 177,425 words. Blood Hunt was 154,148. Since most people think more in terms of pages than words, I’ll give my best estimate: The print edition of Blood Hunt is 516 pages long including all the extra pages like the dedication, author’s note, the TCotS sneak peek, etc. I expect that the print edition of TCotS will be close to 600 pages long.

So, let’s discuss next steps. The first thing I’m doing is taking a short break from writing. One week, to be exact, to let my brain recuperate and distance itself from the work a bit. I’m going to play some video games and relax, and then I’m going to go back to the manuscript and tweak a few things that I already know I don’t like. After that, I will send it out to several trusted readers, who will in turn read it and give me their feedback. This is hugely helpful in identifying inconsistencies, plot holes, and parts of the story that just don’t “work” for people.

Once feedback is gathered, I will begin the second draft. This involves a complete rewrite of the book in a new word processing document, with the first one open on the other side of my monitor. It usually goes much faster than the first draft, and I will be setting myself a much higher nightly word count for that reason.

After the second draft is done, I take another short break, and let my wife read it and give final comments. Then I go back to work, and produce a third draft. This one isn’t rewritten from scratch. Rather, I duplicate the second draft and then go through it making edits and tweaks as I need to. Once that draft is finished, it goes off to my editor, Lauren. She’ll read through the manuscript several times, making multiple passes for tone, consistency, grammar, punctuation, spelling, and so forth. Then she’ll hand me a “marked up” document with all of her changes, thoughts and suggestions, and I’ll go back through the manuscript one more time, incorporating her edits. At that point my work as a writer ends, and my work as production designer begins — that’s how it goes when you format your own print and eBooks, design your own cover, and build your own promotional website.

But we’ll cover that process in more detail when we get to it! For now, the important part is: the first draft’s done. The story’s written. We’re still on schedule for November, 2012. I hope you’ll stick with me for the ride!

UPDATE: Smashwords is back up. Hooray!

At least in the northern hemisphere, February is officially the worst month (no offense to those born during it). It’s cold and grey and dark, there aren’t any big holidays to get excited about, and spring is still so far away the it seems like it will never get here. With that in mind, I have an offering that will hopefully make your February a little less crappy!

How about two full chapters from The Children of the Sun, more than fifteen THOUSAND words, that are completely free of spoilers because they are set in ancient Egypt and tell the story of how Ashayt came to be Ashayt-Sa. Interested? I hope so, because that’s what I’ve got for you, and the best news is that it’s totally free!

Well, OK, it’s totally free if you get it through Smashwords. If you got through Amazon or Barnes & Noble it’ll cost 99 cents. Please note that Smashwords offers formats that are supported by both the Kindle and the Nook, so the ONLY reason to get it from anywhere other than Smashwords is if you feel it’s super-convenient to just go through the other website and not have to manually transfer it to your device, and you therefore find it worth a buck for that convenience.

Anyway, enough with the talking. Here is where to get Amun Sa and the Girl from the Desert:

• Get it free from Smashwords – works with Kindle, Nook, iPhone, iPad, iPod, Sony Reader, Kobo, and pretty much any other device ever.
• Get it for 99 cents from Amazon (Kindle only)
• Get it for 99 cents from Amazon UK (Kindle only)
• Get it for 99 cents from Barnes & Noble (Nook only)

That’s all there is to it! Big thanks to Karla Ortiz for providing the kickass artwork that you see above (and in the book). She comes up with amazing visuals of my characters. Thanks also to Lauren for once again helping me dot the I’s, cross the T’s, and kill about a million unnecessary commas.

Remember to drop me a line on Twitter or on my Facebook Page and let me know what you thought!

As you might recall from my earlier post, I spent the month of January (and the latter part of December) trying to write 1,747 words or more per night on The Children of the Sun. I picked this number because it would get me to 150,000 at the end of the month. Well, 150,028 if you want to be specific. So how did it go? Fantastic, thanks for asking!

January included a trip to Long Island over a weekend, and a couple of other nights were I couldn’t be at the PC such as Jan 31st where I was at a Tool concert, but all told there were only five nights where I wrote less than a thousand words, and only three nights were I wrote zero. I more than made up the difference on the other nights, and actually surpassed 150,028 a day ahead of time, on the 30th. The final tally for the challenge: 150,419, for a total of 63,283 words written in thirty-six days — an average of 1758 per night. Here’s the spreadsheet I used to keep track:

That’s the good news. The bad news is: the book’s still not done! There are a lot of complex story threads to wrap up in The Children of the Sun, and they’re taking more words than I expected. Don’t worry, though, we’re very near the end. I’m guessing it will come in slightly longer than Blood Hunt (which was around 155,000 words). Probably 160 or 170k — and that’s likely to get whittled down a bit in the second draft.

In the meantime, though the challenge is officially over, I am holding myself to a new, slightly less-difficult challenge: 1500+ words per night, every night, until this thing is done. Can I do it?! Well … yeah, probably. We’ll see!

I think I’m going to try an experiment with this blog — I’m going to ask if you fine folks, my readers, have any particular questions for me. They can be about my writing process, or about the II AM Trilogy, or pretty much anything else you can think of. Ever have a question about one of the characters or events in Blood Hunt or TBTB? Ever wanted to know where I do my writing, or when I work, or how I come up with these zany ideas anyway? Now’s your chance!

Just visit my contact form, and ask. I’ll put together the MailBlog entry in a week or two, depending on how many questions come in! Hopefully I’ll get some interesting queries!

Writing a novel, for me, is a lot like driving a car through an area I’m only semi-familiar with.

There are times when I know where I’m going and can comfortably haul along at 65 mph (105 kph, for all my fans outside of the US), churning out 2000-plus words a day and feeling great. This usually happens when I hit a section of the book that I’ve thought about quite a lot already. Because I don’t have to think too much about where I’m going — I “know the area” so to speak — I can concentrate on just getting the words out in a way that hopefully doesn’t sound like the ravings of a deranged chimpanzee, banging on a Speak-n-Spell.

Related to these times, but not quite the same, are the straightaways — periods where I may not even know the road, but it’s so straight and wide and open that I can still just crank out the words. Everything is just clicking, and the story’s flying out behind me. These don’t happen often, but when they do, it might be my favorite part about writing.

More often than anything else, there are times where I have to slow it down to maybe 30 mph (48 kph) because, while I know the general direction I’m headed in, I just don’t really know the roads all that well. I haven’t driven them that often — that is, I haven’t thought about this particular section over and over — and I need to be careful not to miss my turn, and lead the story off into some crazy direction it wasn’t supposed to go. These are the days where I hit 1500 words (or 1,747, right now) and feel more relieved than anything else. “Whew … got through that without crashing into anything.”

Last but not least are the times when things go wrong; you take a bad turn, hit traffic, or find yourself detoured by construction. You have no idea where you’re going and only a vague sense of what the right direction is. More often than not, you end up having to turn around and backtrack. In the writing world, this means you’ve lost the thread of your plot, and usually it means deleting words, sometimes whole paragraphs, to get back to where you need to be. Man, nothing hurts like highlighting an entire paragraph and whaling on the delete key, but sometimes it has to be done!

I try not to “plot” my novels. That is to say: I try not to lay out all of the important elements ahead of time. I like the organic feel of coming up with stuff as I go. At the same time, it’s a bad idea to have no direction whatsoever, so I do like to give myself lots of map markers — points in the plot that I know I want to hit — and then finding my way to them. This lets me have certain scenes that I can think about over and over, and then really tear through. For example, in The Blood That Bonds, I knew what was happening to Abraham well ahead of time. As far as what happens to Theroen? Didn’t know until a few days before it happened. As a consequence, the Abraham scene was much easier and faster to write, but both scenes are equally important to the reader (hopefully!).

I’m nearing the end of The Children of the Sun, now. I’ve just begun the fifth and final section of the book, and it’s an interesting place to be. I’m hoping for lots of straightaways, and I have a few more map markers guiding my way, but I’m not kidding myself: there’s going to be some twists and turns, and maybe even some backtracking, before I reach that final destination.

Good gentlemen, gentlewomen, and gentlecreatures who read this blog, I am pleased to alert you to the fact that in late December I decided it was time to make a concentrated push to get the first draft of The Children of the Sun finished up and out to my early-draft readers. Thus, I began the 1,747 words per day challenge on December 27th.

“What’s the 1,747 word challenge?” you ask? Why, it’s a challenge to myself to write at least 1,747 words every day from now until the end of January.

“Why 1,747 words?” you ask? Well, because when I started the challenge, I was at 87,136 words, and I figure the book is going to be about 150,000 words long (about the same size as Blood Hunt), and so I determined that 1,747 words a day would get me to 150,000 on January 31. If the book isn’t finished at that point, it will be very close! Also, “seventeen-forty-seven” just sounds nice when you say it out loud.

“How’s it going?” you ask? Swimmingly! So far I’ve written 16,750 words since the challenge started, which is an average of 1,861 words per day! I’ve only come in below 1,747 once, and that was on New Year’s Eve (where I still managed a thousand words before my wife and I began gorging ourselves on oysters and champagne). If you discount that day, I’m averaging more like 1,965!

“Why should I care?” you ask? Because the faster I finish the first draft, the faster I can get it out to my early readers — people who I trust to go through the book and tell me which parts of it are crap. The faster I get it to them, the faster they can get their feedback to me, and the faster I can start on the second draft, and … well, you get the idea. This whole process leads up to me releasing The Children of the Sun, and I would hope that we can all agree that the earlier I do that, the better!

So, stay tuned. There will be further updates on the 1,747 challenge. ALSO, I will be releasing more than 15,000 spoiler-free words from The Children of the Sun in early February. The story is a flashback called “Amun Sa and the Girl from the Desert” and tells Ashayt’s backstory. It’s integral to the plot of The Children of the Sun, but it also stands alone. I’m even having Karla Ortiz do an illustration for it! The cost to you, the reader, to download this story? ZERO DOLLARS! Who loves ya?

More soon!

I’ve recently been fortunate enough to receive not one but two reviews of Blood Hunt. Both reviewers liked the book quite a bit, which is always a big plus! I’m glad that people are finding it enjoyable, and are looking forward to The Children of the Sun. I’m working hard to make sure it lives up to the first two books.

The first review to come in was from So Many Books, So Little Time. Here’s an excerpt:

I really enjoyed it, it was great to get more depth on the vampire history and how the story unravels now it has these new twists. There is still violence, fighting, sex(some of it graphic but you should be used to it by now), blood and love and twists and turns throughout the book, it is just different paced from the 1st one but it still works really well.

You can read the whole thing over at SMBSLT.

The second review is an extensive one, and it comes from the awesomely-named blog Bitch Factor 10. It’s a little spoiler-y, though, so beware! Here’s a quote:

I like that we get to find out about the vampire caste system here, and Buecheler does a splendid job of establishing the various vampire worldviews. Abraham, the big baddie from BtB is ever-present in the decisions the American vampire council must grapple with, and we get to meet the movers-and-shakers– namely, Naomi, Jakob, Malik and Stephen (who provides an outsider-insider’s view). The little anarchist in me was thrilled that there were dissidents– I was mildly sympathetic to the plight of the Burilgi, but per usual, their leader is batshit crazy (but hey, that’s way of subalterns, no?).

If you’re not scared of the spoilers, you can check out the review in its entirety over at Bitch Factor 10.

Thanks to both bloggers for taking the time to read and review!

Well, it took a lot of time and hard work, but Blood Hunt has officially been released on time (actually, it was available a few days ahead of time on a couple sites). I’m incredibly excited to have this book out there and I’m curious to hear people’s thoughts on it. I think it’s a better book overall than TBTB, and I hope you all will too!

Complete information can be found on the brand new II AM Trilogy website, but here’s a quick eBook availability list:

• Kindle – Available
• Nook – Available
• Smashwords – Available
• iBooks – Available
• Sony – Coming Soon
• Kobo – Submitted. Coming Soon
• Diesel – Coming Soon

Note: Smashwords has formats that can be read by the Sony and Kobo readers, so if you have a PC-to-device cable, you can buy the book from Smashwords and not have wait!

The book is also available in print from CreateSpace, and soon from Amazon. Also for a limited time I am offering signed copies via the Blood Hunt section of the website. These copies come at no extra charge, but I do include shipping in the price.

The best thing you can do to help Blood Hunt succeed, other than buying it, is rate and review it anywhere and everywhere you can think of! There’s a complete list of places that it’s available for review in the Blood Hunt section of the II AM Trilogy Website, so please check it out!

Thanks again to my awesome editor Lauren and my awesome cover illustrator Karla!

Now to get back to The Children of the Sun …

My short Sci-Fi story Watchers has been picked up and published by the good folks over at Aurora Wolf, a literary journal of science fiction and fantasy. It’s free to read online, and will be available in an upcoming print anthology as well.

Watchers is set in the relatively near future, a time when mankind has mastered space travel within the solar system, but has not yet branched out into other galaxies.

Here’s an excerpt!

Stef sighed, adjusted the feeding tube at her side, glanced over at him with her big, grey-green eyes and asked, “Can they cure it?”

“It’s not going well,” he replied, and she rolled those lovely eyes at him, looking back out the port window.

“Well, no kidding. What does that mean?”

“It mutates faster than anything we’ve ever seen. By the time the body even figures out how to attack it, it’s changed.”

Stef made a noise: psssshhh, and rested her forehead against her hand. “It’s almost worse that it didn’t come from us.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, from Earth. We managed to avoid all that stuff down there, disease and global warming and war, for what? So some rock could crash-land in a field somewhere … bam. That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

Stef shook her head. “Jesus Christ.”

“Lots of people calling for Him, down there,” he told her. “I don’t think He’s going to show.”

Stef looked up at him again, eyelids tinted red at their edges. Her cheeks were mottled pink, her brow pinched, her whole face twisted. Dark brown curls of hair were plastered against her forehead; others stuck out at odd angles from around her headset. He thought about the last time they had been naked together, seventeen days ago, making love standing up in the steam and heat of the shower.

He met her gaze, waiting, and her voice trembled just a little when she spoke.

“Was that a joke? We’re going to die up here.”

“It’s better here,” he said.

…

You can read the whole story at Aurora Wolf!