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!

The results are in! I’ve drawn winners for all of the prizes in the II AM Trilogy “I Want a New eReader” Contest. Thanks to everyone who entered (more than 1,100 of you!) and congratulations to those who won. I’ll be holding more contests in 2012, including one for an early look at The Children of the Sun, so stay tuned!

Here’s the winner list:

Grand Prize

• Tiffany Tillman

First Prize

• Joiceann Fromm
• Clinton Ferreira
• Tammy Grice
• Fiona Cox
• Nanang Denny Vagustira

Second Prize

• Tyler Holland
• Brooke Jennings
• Sadie Samways
• Nadine Nel
• Luke Wolf
• Diane Ellison
• Richard Cook
• Julie Murray
• Caroline Massey
• Ginamarie Calix

My readers have been good to me. Blood Hunt is selling very well, particularly for an indie eBook, and feedback on the book has been extremely positive! With that in mind, I’ve put together a little contest. I’m giving away a free iPad 2, Kindle Fire, or Nook Color … along with some signed copies of my books (or gift cards for people who already have signed copies). Part of the idea of the contest is, of course, to drum up new readers, but it’s also a chance for existing readers to win something cool. It’s a way of saying “Thanks” for all the support and encouragement that so many of you have given me.

The contest runs til November 30, so there’s plenty of time to read The Blood That Bonds and Blood Hunt, if you haven’t already, and make sure you get those questions right.

You can visit the contest website now to see what the questions are or to enter. Good luck!

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 …

This is not the post you’ve been breathlessly awaiting. That one’s coming either tomorrow or Thursday. :)

However, there are a couple of small things I wanted to mention. First, I finally figured out how to make it so people can comment on the individual novel pages for The Blood That Bonds and Blood Hunt. Thrilling, right? [Update] A clarification: by comment on the individual pages, I mean the pages I host on this blog to promote the books (the place where you go if you click either of those two links), not every single page of each book.

Also, I wanted to say thanks to Asleigh for her nice review of The Blood That Bonds over at her blog, The Book Girl. Check it out!

That’s all I got for today. The big news is coming later this week!

Well, it’s been a busy August.

Blood Hunt prep reached a frenetic level in the past few weeks as I scrambled to assemble the various documents necessary to create the Kindle, Smashwords (who distribute to Nook, the iBookstore, Sony, and so forth), and print versions of the book. I’m pleased to say that as of today, there’s nothing left for me to do — it’s all in the hands of the people whose job it is to go over the book and approve it for distribution. I see no reason it won’t be approved by all of the above, and it should be available in most places on the expected launch date of September first. Awesome, right?

It almost wasn’t. Awesome, that is. It was almost terrible. I had a cover artist lined up and he started working on his illustration months ago, back in May. Unfortunately, something happened — I don’t know what — and he seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. I sincerely hope he’s ok, and I waited as long as I could to give him a chance to answer my emails, but eventually I had to move on.

Fortunately, I had spoken in the past with the very talented Karla Ortiz [blog], who was one of my finalists for the original website artwork job for The Blood That Bonds. I ended up going with Garry Brown, who has a more graphic style, for that particular project, but I thought that Karla’s painterly style (her fine art is magnificent) would work well for a book cover. So I sent her a desperate email, hoping she was both interested and available for some freelance work. It turned out that she was, and that she didn’t even mind the ridiculous, three-and-a-half week deadline that I was proposing.

I sent her some excerpts from the book, a couple of character descriptions, and a few other items and ideas I thought might help, and she got to work putting together some thumbnails — small, rough drawings of potential layouts. Here’s the original thumbnail that I ended up going with:

I made several suggestions to Karla about how I’d like to see the drawing evolve, and she came back with this second thumbnail, which I thought was pretty awesome:

Happy with that, we went to doing the full sketch, which is a more detailed line drawing that she would use to paint the final piece. Here it is:

It was at this point that I made what Karla described as “the most awesome request ever” — I asked her to not make Two too pretty. Karla is a video game artist and has to spend a lot of time drawing women who are supernaturally beautiful, and while I’ve always described Two as cute, she’s definitely not a fashion model. I felt it was important to contrast her a bit more against the exquisitely pretty vampire she shares the cover with, to show that Two is a human being who has not been perfected by decades of exposure to vampire blood. Excited to draw a “real” woman for a change, Karla went back and made some changes to Two, resulting in this sketch:

I liked that very much, and so we were ready to proceed to full painting. After a couple of days, Karla came back with this mostly-finished piece:

I thought it was gorgeous, and only had a few small tweaks (for example, mentioning that Two’s eyes are green). She also wanted to put some more detail into the hair, the background, and a few other areas. The final illustration looks like this:

Now it was my turn to do some work — I do my cover layouts myself, and had actually been working with Karla’s sketches and thumbs to block out the type the way I wanted it, so it didn’t take long to pull everything together into the final cover. Here it is:

And that’s the story of Blood Hunt’s cover illustration evolution. Huge thanks again to Karla for getting everything done in such a short amount of time. She rocks!

Oh, and who is that lovely vampire leaning over Two’s shoulder, who seems both ready to attack and yet oddly gentle in her touch? I guess you’ll have to read the book and find out.

September first. Watch this blog (and Twitter, and Facebook, and the website) for information on how to get it!

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!

I’ve mentioned this on Facebook and Twitter, but it’s probably worth an official mention here on ye olde writing blog as well: I’ve set an official release date for the eBook edition of Blood Hunt!

On September 1, 2011, you’ll be able to download the book for Kindle, Nook, iPhone/iPad, Sony Reader, Kobo, and pretty much any other reader you might want to use. It will cost $2.99, which I don’t think is bad for a novel that’s almost twice as long as TBTB. Hopefully you’ll agree!

In the meantime, you might want to head on over to the official Blood Hunt website and check out the first chapter, which I have posted online in its entirety!

A couple more people have taken the time to review The Blood That Bonds on their blogs and offer some kind words about it. I figure the least I can do is link back to them in return!

• The Blood That Bonds Review by Tim Beachum
• The Blood That Bonds Review by Rebecca Hart

Thanks very much for taking the time to talk about TBTB with your readers, Tim and Rebecca! If anyone else out there has posted a review, please don’t hesitate to send me the link!