Oops. Just realized I had a brainfart while writing the previous update. The author of the books I was talking about, Steven Caldwell, wrote the text but didn’t do any of the artwork, if I remember correctly. The artist was Joe Petagno, if I’m not mistaken. Just wanted to clear that up.
Finally, an update. I’ve been going over the whole book from the beginning, doing a light polish, tweaking a bit here and there, to help get my brain back on track to finish the story. Just finished revising Chapter 9 a few minutes ago, and something in it that had been sloshing around in my head for a very long time finally solidified. There’s a sinister alien that appears in an ancient video record that was inspired by something I saw when I was a little kid and had mostly forgotten over all these years.
The image stuck in my head when my age was still measured in a single digit. It lodged in my imagination and percolated away for somewhere around thirty-five to forty years, but I’d long since forgotten exactly where I’d seen it or who the artist was. But when I was trying to come up with a scary creature for that scene in Chapter 9, my fuzzy memory of that image sprang to mind:
A dark thing emerged from the rift. Kolya couldn’t guess its size with nothing nearby to compare it to. She couldn’t make out its exact shape, either -- its features rippled and blurred and faded in and out as if partially obscured by thick smoke. She caught a glimpse of what might have been a cape or cloak. Near the top were six orbs that glowed sickly yellow-green. Eyes, possibly.
It was like an itch I couldn’t scratch, being unable to remember exactly what had inspired that. Then, recently, it finally came back to me. I had a set of books when I was a kid -- not the complete set, only four of six volumes -- filled with artwork by Steven Caldwell. Those images had inspired my imagination, and often my nightmares as well, back in those days. The four books I had were Aliens in Space, Star Quest, Fantastic Planet, and Settlers in Space. Aliens in Space was the one that had the image that sparked off the idea I had for Uncharted Territory decades later.
It’s good to finally scratch that itch ... but that thing still makes my skin crawl. When I was a kid, it was utterly terrifying. No wonder it stuck in my head, as degraded as my memory of it became over the years. The idea it inspired ended up being rather different as a result. The creature in Chapter 9 appeared to be partly obscured by shifting smoke as well as fading in and out of focus. Also, I probably got the idea for its six glowing eyes from the Iconians in Star Trek Online.
Another thing I remember from those books is a sense of wonder about the universe, which I haven’t gotten from sci-fi very much aside from Babylon 5 and some episodes of Doctor Who and Star Trek. Trek and Star Wars, in particular, treat going to different planets the way we treat driving to the nearest grocery store. One of the things I wanted to infuse Game Over, Uncharted Territory, and its sequels with was a sense of mystery and wonder, of traveling to places no one has set foot in thousands of years, of uncovering tantalizing glimpses of civilizations that vanished hundreds of thousands of years ago, beings who were -- to borrow a bit of dialog from Babylon 5 -- vast and timeless and who walked among the stars like giants.
As much as the Mass Effect series is one of my favorite sci-fi franchises, it does seem to have a tendency to recycle the idea of a precursor species in the distant past that returns and threatens to wipe out all life in the galaxy. So that’s a trope I’m trying to avoid with these novels, but I do love the idea of playing around with extinct civilizations and having characters uncover hints of what came before, but I’ll be going out of my way to avoid having said ancient species return with an evil plan to enslave or exterminate everyone in their path. I just love the little shiver I get when thinking about ancient, deserted planets and ruins left behind by once-mighty civilizations that have long since gone to dust.
I’m hoping to capture a bit of that "magic" in Uncharted Territory ...
The thing is ... none of it is working. Two months in, with only 30 days remaining till the deadline, Game Over is still sitting at zero preorders. Which isn’t the first time something like this has happened. If I remember correctly, Project Revenant reached its deadline with maybe two or three preorders. Before trying Inkshares, I put both books on Kindle Scout, and when it was over, both of them finished with exactly zero votes.
One of the issues I’ve had all along was my inability to advertise effectively due to having no money to spare for buying ads or traveling all over the country to promote my books. My income is barely enough to scrape by every month, so I have to make do with whatever I can get for free. Twitter and Facebook help draw attention to my work, but apparently not enough to compel new readers to sign up and preorder. I’ve spent entire days searching for places to promote the book without having to pay a fee, and half of them no longer exist by the time I find them. The rest only accept links to books already published on Amazon and other sites, aside from the occasional page that accepts other works, but so far none of them have responded to my queries.
The other issue is the job and other everyday-life stuff getting in the way. I envy writers who make a living with their writing or at least are able to keep a regular writing schedule. I’d be able to keep at it more regularly if I could ditch the job, but I can’t do that and keep a roof over my head. So it’s time I stop kidding myself. I’m not giving up just yet. I’ve put too many years into this -- 27, give or take, so far -- to admit defeat. I just need to acknowledge when something isn’t working and move on to something else. Maybe I’ll submit Game Over to a huge publisher and get lucky, or maybe I’ll find another approach that actually works. I haven’t exhausted all the possibilities yet.
I looked through the FAQ and didn’t find an option to end the campaign early, so I’ll just wait it out and take the book down after the deadline. I’ll keep Uncharted Territory up for the time being, and post the revised chapters and continue working on it until it’s finished, so the readers who have enjoyed the work in progress can see the rest of the story. After that ... well, it depends on what happens with Game Over.
For anyone who wants to keep updated on the book’s status and my other projects, I’ll pop in a link to my blog, which has links in a sidebar to all of my writing projects.
Finally, I want to thank everyone who followed me and my books here. It’s very much appreciated, and I can’t help feeling like I’ve let everyone down. But it was a fun and interesting experiment while it lasted. It was definitely worth a shot. As Jack Burton once said, "Hey, ya never know till you try."
First off, apologies for taking so long between updates. I’ve been focusing most of my effort recently on Game Over because Uncharted Territory is its sequel. I figured I should polish the book, add a few more chapters, and start taking pre-orders. Before that, I had a long string of everyday-life stuff keeping me pretty thoroughly derailed, but that’s a whole other rant.
As part of the campaign, I’ve been posting a series of character profiles on my blog. Since these characters appear in both Game Over and Uncharted Territory, I thought it might be of interest to those who are following UT. So far I’ve posted profiles of Dylan Engstrom, Cora, and Grishnag, and the next one I’m planning is for Nishara.
Once I start making some progress on that, I’m hoping to get back to Uncharted Territory, give it a light polish, and then actually finish it and start its pre-order campaign. And after that, the plan is to start working on the sequel to Project Revenant.
So if you’ve been enjoying Uncharted Territory, please check out Game Over and consider pre-ordering a copy. :D
I’ve just started taking pre-orders for Game Over. As mentioned if a previous update, I decided to post that book here and finish polishing it, then kick off the pre-order campaign because it’s set chronologically before Uncharted Territory and introduces many of the characters in it. I’d started posting UT here first because I had Game Over published through Vook, which later became Pronoun, and not too long ago Pronoun closed down. So I thought it made sense to put the book here so those familiar with the characters in Uncharted Territory can see where it all started.
As an introduction to Game Over, I’ll be writing up a series of blog posts giving an overview of the book, character profiles, and other bits of business. I posted the first earlier this evening.
Please check out Game Over and, if you like it, follow and pre-order and let’s see if we can get this baby published. :D
So ... it’s way past time for an update, and this has to start with an apology for being inactive here for so long. It was due to a variety of factors, including job schedule, a string of unfortunate circumstances (including a number of computer problems, the most recent of which was a Windows Update gone so completely awry that the only option I had was to reset my computer, which wiped all my programs and reinstalled Windows), repeated bouts of writer’s block, and some rather hefty depression issues which I still haven’t beaten. Aside from keeping up with a couple of fanfiction pieces, however sporadically, as far as writing is concerned I very nearly just ... gave up.
I won’t go into much detail so I don’t look like I’m whining. I’ll just say that my one success at getting published hasn’t been selling and due to some issues with the publisher I’ve decided to wait for the contract to expire and see if I can find another home for the book. None of my indie works were selling, so I took them all down and have been thinking over a few ideas on other ways to publish them. I’ve been considering trying a few things with them on my Patreon page, but haven’t settled on anything concrete yet.
The only thing my officially-published novel led to, a short story in a sci-fi/paranormal romance anthology that I’ve probably mentioned before, was a small success in that I liked the story and characters enough to expand it into a full novel, Uncharted Territory. But the anthology sold so poorly that the publisher took it down from Amazon. But at least I’m getting a full novel out of it, which I didn’t even have a story for until I was invited to submit one for the anthology, so hooray for that. If nothing goes horribly wrong, this will turn into a whole series of books.
So here’s where I start trying to be positive. After Uncharted Territory was derailed for so long, I decided to give it a rewrite and start posting the updated chapters here, partly to refresh my memory of where the story was going. Then I started thinking about the previous short novel, Game Over, which introduced the crew of the ship UT’s Kolya Mason joins. That shorter work is essentially the first book in the series, so I decided to give it another polish and add a bit of new content and post it here to see if it gains any traction. I’ve gone through the first five chapters, so far, and will start posting them shortly. Once the full book is up here, I’ll get back to work on Uncharted Territory.
As I mentioned above, I’m still not out of the woods as far as the depression problem goes, but I realized that if I don’t just dive back in and get back to work on these books, they’ll never get finished. I’ll do my best not to drop off the radar again, and to (as the late, great Monty Oum liked to say) keep moving forward.
Just one quick thing, this time. Another thunderstorm started a few minutes ago, and I need to get this posted before the power gets knocked out. (Ugh, I’ll be glad when the monsoon season is over.)
Anyway. I finished and posted the latest chapter of Uncharted Territory a few days ago, and the new character I mentioned previously made her first appearance there. I made several attempts at inserting the image from the previous update into a background, but never managed to get it to look right. One of my friends gave me some tips on how to blend the two pictures together, so I tried again this afternoon. Don’t think it’s quite there yet, but it’s a vast improvement over my previous attempts. Still need to play around with it a little and see what I can do with it, but here’s the current version.
I figure this image might work as a biographical card, with the character’s info in the space on the left. Also, the right half would make a good book cover, and the left half would work as the back cover with a descriptive blurb and whatnot added. So, that’s pretty cool.
Up next: a new chapter of Harbinger, followed by another chapter of Uncharted Territory, if all goes well.
Whew. Everyday life is still taking up most of my time. Mainly it’s my job and the weird schedule, which leaves me scrambling to catch up on my days off. Well, another thing is also just me having too many projects going at once, so that part of it is my own fault. ;)
I’ll hopefully have the next chapter of Uncharted Territory finished soon(ish). I managed to get a few other things accomplished in the meantime.
The last bit of business for tonight is actually related to Uncharted Territory, and is also just really, really cool. A bit of inspiration hit while I was having my morning coffee and trying to finish waking up. I’ve been using Big Stock Photo for the images I use for my book covers. Didn’t cost anything to sign up, and when I joined they were running an offer that lets me download one free image per month. I keep getting sidetracked and forgetting to sign back in and grab a free image, but occasionally I remember. :P
I generally look for starscapes or alien planets or cities/landscapes, etc., that I can place text over for the book titles and whatnot. Suddenly remembered the site existed this morning, planned to download one of the alien-planet pictures I’d saved to my shopping list, when I stumbled onto this image.
I took one look at it and an idea for a whole new character popped into my head. I’ll be adding her to Uncharted Territory and sometime later on making her the central character in another book (and the above image will be one of the elements in the cover art, laid over a background image). Which is pretty much how Kolya Mason started off and ended up in Uncharted Territory. Sometimes all it takes is a single image to enter my line of sight and bam! -- a whole new character comes together in my head in a matter of minutes. I love it when that happens.
I decided to name her Vacendak. Heh ... Freejack wasn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen, but it had a lot of fun moments, and for some reason that name stuck in my head for all these years. It just seemed to fit this picture and the ideas I had for this new character.
You’ll be seeing more of her soon, starting with an upcoming chapter of Uncharted Territory ....
Just a quick note, for now. After too many months, I’ve finally finished the newest chapter of Uncharted Territory. The delays were brought on by numerous everyday-life issues getting in the way, but I’m kinda sorta getting back to work on various projects. I’m coming up to the halfway point of this particular book, and I’m hoping to keep at it until it’s finished, so it doesn’t take several years like Project Revenant did. O_o
Speaking of which, the final draft of Project Revenant was submitted to Baen Books a couple of weeks ago. Now I wait to hear back from them ... and their response time is nine to twelve months. Been a while since I’ve tried my luck with a major print publisher, so I’m long overdue. Who knows, maybe this’ll be the one that gets me in the door.
I’ve got a pretty solid idea for the main plot of the sequel, along with other threads continuing from Project Revenant. I probably should get started on it soon, while the ideas are fresh in my mind, but I want to try to focus on Uncharted Territory, at least until I’ve made significant progress.
Once UT is finished, if it doesn’t work out here at Inkshares, I’ll give Kindle Scout another shot. If that doesn’t work, maybe I’ll try Baen again. If they don’t pick up the manuscript I already submitted, maybe a space opera will be more to their liking.
And now I should get to work on Chapter 11.
In the meantime, how about a short reading list for anyone who’d like to check out more of my work?
Chaser, my first published novel, available as an ebook from Amazon. And here’s a five-star review. :D
Load, the first book in the Neon City series, of which Project Revenant is the third installment.
Downtime, a novelette that bridges the first and second books in this series.
Reactivated, the first book (more of a novella, in this case) in a GI Joe series titled Omega Section, which was published by Kindle Worlds. And a five-star review. ;)
Elsewhere, a serialized story spun off from an event in Chaser, focusing on a handful of minor characters who appeared in that book. It’s another project I’ve had to put on the back burner due to the various disruptions going on in my life, but I’m hoping to get back to work on it once I finish UT and get back into a routine with my other projects.
Finally, for some totally free, no-strings-attached stories, I’ve got some fanfiction I’ve been writing both just for the fun of it, and to provide more samples of my writing.
Freelancers, an ongoing story which turns loose a few original characters in the Mass Effect setting and will unfold very differently from the events in Mass Effect 3, because that game’s story was just terrible. Not just the ending. Almost all of it. :P I started off writing this just for fun, but then ME3 happened, and now I’m on a mission. XD
Game-Changer, based on Transformers Prime. Started with an idea that popped into my head and just wouldn’t go away. I thought it might make for an interesting story, so I wrote it, and it’s been continued in the following stories:
And here I go again, planning just a short note, and ending up going on and on and on. And on. Now I really should get back to UT and a few other things I need to catch up on. Thanks for putting up with my bloviating.
I must apologies again for the lack of updates over the past few months. Everyday-life stuff has been interfering in a huge way, but I’ve finally begun to get back on track. So far I’ve finished a new chapter of Freelancers and a new chapter of Harbinger, I’m editing Project Revenant with plans to submit it to Baen, and I’m finally about to get back to work on Uncharted Territory.
On a related note, a few minutes ago I received some news about the sci-fi/paranormal romance anthology Lucky Stars, which includes the story Uncharted Territory is based on, "Mission to Bellatrix." It hasn’t been selling well, so it’ll be taken down on June 30. It’s disappointing that it hasn’t been a huge seller like previous anthologies, but I’m grateful to everyone involved for giving me a chance. It was one of the most fun projects I’ve been a part of, and my story in the anthology was something I realized I could expand into a full novel with additional characters and more exploration of the ship and the ruins that merely served as a backdrop in the short story. I’m building upon that in Uncharted Territory, and I’m hoping it turns out to be something special. If nothing else, I’m certainly having a lot of fun with it.
Lucky Stars is still 99 cents, so if anyone wants to check it out, it’ll be on Amazon until June 30.
In the meantime, I’m getting back to work on the novel, and if all goes well, I’ll have a new chapter to post soon....
Oops. Just realized I had a brainfart while writing the previous update. The author of the books I was talking about, Steven Caldwell, wrote the text but didn’t do any of the artwork, if I remember correctly. The artist was Joe Petagno, if I’m not mistaken. Just wanted to clear that up.
Finally, an update. I’ve been going over the whole book from the beginning, doing a light polish, tweaking a bit here and there, to help get my brain back on track to finish the story. Just finished revising Chapter 9 a few minutes ago, and something in it that had been sloshing around in my head for a very long time finally solidified. There’s a sinister alien that appears in an ancient video record that was inspired by something I saw when I was a little kid and had mostly forgotten over all these years.
The image stuck in my head when my age was still measured in a single digit. It lodged in my imagination and percolated away for somewhere around thirty-five to forty years, but I’d long since forgotten exactly where I’d seen it or who the artist was. But when I was trying to come up with a scary creature for that scene in Chapter 9, my fuzzy memory of that image sprang to mind:
A dark thing emerged from the rift. Kolya couldn’t guess its size with nothing nearby to compare it to. She couldn’t make out its exact shape, either -- its features rippled and blurred and faded in and out as if partially obscured by thick smoke. She caught a glimpse of what might have been a cape or cloak. Near the top were six orbs that glowed sickly yellow-green. Eyes, possibly.
It was like an itch I couldn’t scratch, being unable to remember exactly what had inspired that. Then, recently, it finally came back to me. I had a set of books when I was a kid -- not the complete set, only four of six volumes -- filled with artwork by Steven Caldwell. Those images had inspired my imagination, and often my nightmares as well, back in those days. The four books I had were Aliens in Space, Star Quest, Fantastic Planet, and Settlers in Space. Aliens in Space was the one that had the image that sparked off the idea I had for Uncharted Territory decades later.
It’s good to finally scratch that itch ... but that thing still makes my skin crawl. When I was a kid, it was utterly terrifying. No wonder it stuck in my head, as degraded as my memory of it became over the years. The idea it inspired ended up being rather different as a result. The creature in Chapter 9 appeared to be partly obscured by shifting smoke as well as fading in and out of focus. Also, I probably got the idea for its six glowing eyes from the Iconians in Star Trek Online.
Another thing I remember from those books is a sense of wonder about the universe, which I haven’t gotten from sci-fi very much aside from Babylon 5 and some episodes of Doctor Who and Star Trek. Trek and Star Wars, in particular, treat going to different planets the way we treat driving to the nearest grocery store. One of the things I wanted to infuse Game Over, Uncharted Territory, and its sequels with was a sense of mystery and wonder, of traveling to places no one has set foot in thousands of years, of uncovering tantalizing glimpses of civilizations that vanished hundreds of thousands of years ago, beings who were -- to borrow a bit of dialog from Babylon 5 -- vast and timeless and who walked among the stars like giants.
This scene from B5, in fact, does a pretty good job of bringing a sense of wonder into its setting.
As much as the Mass Effect series is one of my favorite sci-fi franchises, it does seem to have a tendency to recycle the idea of a precursor species in the distant past that returns and threatens to wipe out all life in the galaxy. So that’s a trope I’m trying to avoid with these novels, but I do love the idea of playing around with extinct civilizations and having characters uncover hints of what came before, but I’ll be going out of my way to avoid having said ancient species return with an evil plan to enslave or exterminate everyone in their path. I just love the little shiver I get when thinking about ancient, deserted planets and ruins left behind by once-mighty civilizations that have long since gone to dust.
I’m hoping to capture a bit of that "magic" in Uncharted Territory ...
Long-overdue update here, mostly regarding Game Over, the book to which Uncharted Territory is the sequel.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve added a number of character profiles to my blog: Dylan, Cora, Grishnag, Nishara, Syala, and Ayastal. I also put up an introduction and a snippet of a scene in a post titled, "Finding the Silver Lining," which shows Dylan’s sometimes peculiar way of looking at things.
The thing is ... none of it is working. Two months in, with only 30 days remaining till the deadline, Game Over is still sitting at zero preorders. Which isn’t the first time something like this has happened. If I remember correctly, Project Revenant reached its deadline with maybe two or three preorders. Before trying Inkshares, I put both books on Kindle Scout, and when it was over, both of them finished with exactly zero votes.
One of the issues I’ve had all along was my inability to advertise effectively due to having no money to spare for buying ads or traveling all over the country to promote my books. My income is barely enough to scrape by every month, so I have to make do with whatever I can get for free. Twitter and Facebook help draw attention to my work, but apparently not enough to compel new readers to sign up and preorder. I’ve spent entire days searching for places to promote the book without having to pay a fee, and half of them no longer exist by the time I find them. The rest only accept links to books already published on Amazon and other sites, aside from the occasional page that accepts other works, but so far none of them have responded to my queries.
The other issue is the job and other everyday-life stuff getting in the way. I envy writers who make a living with their writing or at least are able to keep a regular writing schedule. I’d be able to keep at it more regularly if I could ditch the job, but I can’t do that and keep a roof over my head. So it’s time I stop kidding myself. I’m not giving up just yet. I’ve put too many years into this -- 27, give or take, so far -- to admit defeat. I just need to acknowledge when something isn’t working and move on to something else. Maybe I’ll submit Game Over to a huge publisher and get lucky, or maybe I’ll find another approach that actually works. I haven’t exhausted all the possibilities yet.
I looked through the FAQ and didn’t find an option to end the campaign early, so I’ll just wait it out and take the book down after the deadline. I’ll keep Uncharted Territory up for the time being, and post the revised chapters and continue working on it until it’s finished, so the readers who have enjoyed the work in progress can see the rest of the story. After that ... well, it depends on what happens with Game Over.
For anyone who wants to keep updated on the book’s status and my other projects, I’ll pop in a link to my blog, which has links in a sidebar to all of my writing projects.
Finally, I want to thank everyone who followed me and my books here. It’s very much appreciated, and I can’t help feeling like I’ve let everyone down. But it was a fun and interesting experiment while it lasted. It was definitely worth a shot. As Jack Burton once said, "Hey, ya never know till you try."
First off, apologies for taking so long between updates. I’ve been focusing most of my effort recently on Game Over because Uncharted Territory is its sequel. I figured I should polish the book, add a few more chapters, and start taking pre-orders. Before that, I had a long string of everyday-life stuff keeping me pretty thoroughly derailed, but that’s a whole other rant.
As part of the campaign, I’ve been posting a series of character profiles on my blog. Since these characters appear in both Game Over and Uncharted Territory, I thought it might be of interest to those who are following UT. So far I’ve posted profiles of Dylan Engstrom, Cora, and Grishnag, and the next one I’m planning is for Nishara.
Once I start making some progress on that, I’m hoping to get back to Uncharted Territory, give it a light polish, and then actually finish it and start its pre-order campaign. And after that, the plan is to start working on the sequel to Project Revenant.
So if you’ve been enjoying Uncharted Territory, please check out Game Over and consider pre-ordering a copy. :D
Finally, some news. It’s about time, huh?
I’ve just started taking pre-orders for Game Over. As mentioned if a previous update, I decided to post that book here and finish polishing it, then kick off the pre-order campaign because it’s set chronologically before Uncharted Territory and introduces many of the characters in it. I’d started posting UT here first because I had Game Over published through Vook, which later became Pronoun, and not too long ago Pronoun closed down. So I thought it made sense to put the book here so those familiar with the characters in Uncharted Territory can see where it all started.
As an introduction to Game Over, I’ll be writing up a series of blog posts giving an overview of the book, character profiles, and other bits of business. I posted the first earlier this evening.
Please check out Game Over and, if you like it, follow and pre-order and let’s see if we can get this baby published. :D
So ... it’s way past time for an update, and this has to start with an apology for being inactive here for so long. It was due to a variety of factors, including job schedule, a string of unfortunate circumstances (including a number of computer problems, the most recent of which was a Windows Update gone so completely awry that the only option I had was to reset my computer, which wiped all my programs and reinstalled Windows), repeated bouts of writer’s block, and some rather hefty depression issues which I still haven’t beaten. Aside from keeping up with a couple of fanfiction pieces, however sporadically, as far as writing is concerned I very nearly just ... gave up.
I won’t go into much detail so I don’t look like I’m whining. I’ll just say that my one success at getting published hasn’t been selling and due to some issues with the publisher I’ve decided to wait for the contract to expire and see if I can find another home for the book. None of my indie works were selling, so I took them all down and have been thinking over a few ideas on other ways to publish them. I’ve been considering trying a few things with them on my Patreon page, but haven’t settled on anything concrete yet.
The only thing my officially-published novel led to, a short story in a sci-fi/paranormal romance anthology that I’ve probably mentioned before, was a small success in that I liked the story and characters enough to expand it into a full novel, Uncharted Territory. But the anthology sold so poorly that the publisher took it down from Amazon. But at least I’m getting a full novel out of it, which I didn’t even have a story for until I was invited to submit one for the anthology, so hooray for that. If nothing goes horribly wrong, this will turn into a whole series of books.
So here’s where I start trying to be positive. After Uncharted Territory was derailed for so long, I decided to give it a rewrite and start posting the updated chapters here, partly to refresh my memory of where the story was going. Then I started thinking about the previous short novel, Game Over, which introduced the crew of the ship UT’s Kolya Mason joins. That shorter work is essentially the first book in the series, so I decided to give it another polish and add a bit of new content and post it here to see if it gains any traction. I’ve gone through the first five chapters, so far, and will start posting them shortly. Once the full book is up here, I’ll get back to work on Uncharted Territory.
As I mentioned above, I’m still not out of the woods as far as the depression problem goes, but I realized that if I don’t just dive back in and get back to work on these books, they’ll never get finished. I’ll do my best not to drop off the radar again, and to (as the late, great Monty Oum liked to say) keep moving forward.
Just one quick thing, this time. Another thunderstorm started a few minutes ago, and I need to get this posted before the power gets knocked out. (Ugh, I’ll be glad when the monsoon season is over.)
Anyway. I finished and posted the latest chapter of Uncharted Territory a few days ago, and the new character I mentioned previously made her first appearance there. I made several attempts at inserting the image from the previous update into a background, but never managed to get it to look right. One of my friends gave me some tips on how to blend the two pictures together, so I tried again this afternoon. Don’t think it’s quite there yet, but it’s a vast improvement over my previous attempts. Still need to play around with it a little and see what I can do with it, but here’s the current version.
I figure this image might work as a biographical card, with the character’s info in the space on the left. Also, the right half would make a good book cover, and the left half would work as the back cover with a descriptive blurb and whatnot added. So, that’s pretty cool.
Up next: a new chapter of Harbinger, followed by another chapter of Uncharted Territory, if all goes well.
Whew. Everyday life is still taking up most of my time. Mainly it’s my job and the weird schedule, which leaves me scrambling to catch up on my days off. Well, another thing is also just me having too many projects going at once, so that part of it is my own fault. ;)
I’ll hopefully have the next chapter of Uncharted Territory finished soon(ish). I managed to get a few other things accomplished in the meantime.
One is another video in my Mass Effect Writing Discussion series on YouTube. Another is Chapter 30 of Freelancers, titled "Winds of Change." It’s posted on Fanfiction.net, Archive of our Own, and FanStory.
The last bit of business for tonight is actually related to Uncharted Territory, and is also just really, really cool. A bit of inspiration hit while I was having my morning coffee and trying to finish waking up. I’ve been using Big Stock Photo for the images I use for my book covers. Didn’t cost anything to sign up, and when I joined they were running an offer that lets me download one free image per month. I keep getting sidetracked and forgetting to sign back in and grab a free image, but occasionally I remember. :P
I generally look for starscapes or alien planets or cities/landscapes, etc., that I can place text over for the book titles and whatnot. Suddenly remembered the site existed this morning, planned to download one of the alien-planet pictures I’d saved to my shopping list, when I stumbled onto this image.
I took one look at it and an idea for a whole new character popped into my head. I’ll be adding her to Uncharted Territory and sometime later on making her the central character in another book (and the above image will be one of the elements in the cover art, laid over a background image). Which is pretty much how Kolya Mason started off and ended up in Uncharted Territory. Sometimes all it takes is a single image to enter my line of sight and bam! -- a whole new character comes together in my head in a matter of minutes. I love it when that happens.
I decided to name her Vacendak. Heh ... Freejack wasn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen, but it had a lot of fun moments, and for some reason that name stuck in my head for all these years. It just seemed to fit this picture and the ideas I had for this new character.
You’ll be seeing more of her soon, starting with an upcoming chapter of Uncharted Territory ....
Just a quick note, for now. After too many months, I’ve finally finished the newest chapter of Uncharted Territory. The delays were brought on by numerous everyday-life issues getting in the way, but I’m kinda sorta getting back to work on various projects. I’m coming up to the halfway point of this particular book, and I’m hoping to keep at it until it’s finished, so it doesn’t take several years like Project Revenant did. O_o
Speaking of which, the final draft of Project Revenant was submitted to Baen Books a couple of weeks ago. Now I wait to hear back from them ... and their response time is nine to twelve months. Been a while since I’ve tried my luck with a major print publisher, so I’m long overdue. Who knows, maybe this’ll be the one that gets me in the door.
I’ve got a pretty solid idea for the main plot of the sequel, along with other threads continuing from Project Revenant. I probably should get started on it soon, while the ideas are fresh in my mind, but I want to try to focus on Uncharted Territory, at least until I’ve made significant progress.
Once UT is finished, if it doesn’t work out here at Inkshares, I’ll give Kindle Scout another shot. If that doesn’t work, maybe I’ll try Baen again. If they don’t pick up the manuscript I already submitted, maybe a space opera will be more to their liking.
And now I should get to work on Chapter 11.
In the meantime, how about a short reading list for anyone who’d like to check out more of my work?
Chaser, my first published novel, available as an ebook from Amazon. And here’s a five-star review. :D
Load, the first book in the Neon City series, of which Project Revenant is the third installment.
Downtime, a novelette that bridges the first and second books in this series.
Fifteen Minutes, the second Neon City novel.
Reactivated, the first book (more of a novella, in this case) in a GI Joe series titled Omega Section, which was published by Kindle Worlds. And a five-star review. ;)
Elsewhere, a serialized story spun off from an event in Chaser, focusing on a handful of minor characters who appeared in that book. It’s another project I’ve had to put on the back burner due to the various disruptions going on in my life, but I’m hoping to get back to work on it once I finish UT and get back into a routine with my other projects.
Game Over, a novelette to which Uncharted Territory is a sequel. And here’s a five-star review. :D
Finally, for some totally free, no-strings-attached stories, I’ve got some fanfiction I’ve been writing both just for the fun of it, and to provide more samples of my writing.
Freelancers, an ongoing story which turns loose a few original characters in the Mass Effect setting and will unfold very differently from the events in Mass Effect 3, because that game’s story was just terrible. Not just the ending. Almost all of it. :P I started off writing this just for fun, but then ME3 happened, and now I’m on a mission. XD
Game-Changer, based on Transformers Prime. Started with an idea that popped into my head and just wouldn’t go away. I thought it might make for an interesting story, so I wrote it, and it’s been continued in the following stories:
Rematch.
Enemy of my Enemy.
Harbinger (currently, still a work in progress).
And here I go again, planning just a short note, and ending up going on and on and on. And on. Now I really should get back to UT and a few other things I need to catch up on. Thanks for putting up with my bloviating.
I must apologies again for the lack of updates over the past few months. Everyday-life stuff has been interfering in a huge way, but I’ve finally begun to get back on track. So far I’ve finished a new chapter of Freelancers and a new chapter of Harbinger, I’m editing Project Revenant with plans to submit it to Baen, and I’m finally about to get back to work on Uncharted Territory.
On a related note, a few minutes ago I received some news about the sci-fi/paranormal romance anthology Lucky Stars, which includes the story Uncharted Territory is based on, "Mission to Bellatrix." It hasn’t been selling well, so it’ll be taken down on June 30. It’s disappointing that it hasn’t been a huge seller like previous anthologies, but I’m grateful to everyone involved for giving me a chance. It was one of the most fun projects I’ve been a part of, and my story in the anthology was something I realized I could expand into a full novel with additional characters and more exploration of the ship and the ruins that merely served as a backdrop in the short story. I’m building upon that in Uncharted Territory, and I’m hoping it turns out to be something special. If nothing else, I’m certainly having a lot of fun with it.
Lucky Stars is still 99 cents, so if anyone wants to check it out, it’ll be on Amazon until June 30.
In the meantime, I’m getting back to work on the novel, and if all goes well, I’ll have a new chapter to post soon....