News! Good news, and not-so-good news.

Let’s get the not-so-good news out of the way. I’ve received word that the release of Unnatural Ends might be delayed another two or three months, though nothing is confirmed yet. This is, apparently, down to some marketing strategy: Inkshares wants to put some extra effort into getting this book into the public eye, and there might be something to aiming for a release in the spring as opposed to the middle of winter. They’re weighing the pros and cons now, and I’m trusting them to do what’s best.

In much better news, we now have a cover!

Credit goes to Tim Barber of Dissect Designs, who’s done some amazing work on a number of other Inkshares titles. For Unnatural Ends, he’s taken the fractured family situation at the core of the story and expressed it as a jumble of mismatched pieces forced together. Brilliance, I think.

Now we just have to wait for Inkshares to work their marketing magic (consider telling your local library) and for the book to make its way to the bookstore shelves.

Happy Spooky Season! This is a roundup of where things are at with my participation at the World Fantasy Convention (WFC 2021) this week, Bane of All Things’ release on Dec. 7, and my health.

WFC 2021

Note, this event is live and virtual from Montreal – so all times are in the Eastern Time Zone. I am attending virtually, and you can, too. The cost to do so for the whole weekend (which starts on Thursday with the first panels at 4 p.m.) is US$75 or CDN$100. 

More information about the registration, attendance options, and how to register, can be found here.

My activities at WFC:

• Thursday, Nov. 4, 7 p.m.: I am on a panel with four others – Possession is 9/10s of the Law. We will explore the thorny question of whether a creator can possess (own, trademark, copyright, etc.) story plots that give them the sole right to a setting, a type of character, or even a name. The answer would appear to be obvious … or is it? How do you stake your claim? What happens when estates get involved? Who does the law side with? Who gets the book? Who gets the revenue?

• Friday, Nov. 5, Noon: I read from Bane of All Things! This will be my first time ever reading from my work before an audience like this, even if virtually rather than in person. 

Here is the full conference programme.

Bane of All Things’ release date is Dec. 7!

I emphasize this because the old and no-longer-relevant November release date is still displaying on a few online retail sites. This is due to a digital glitch in the global distribution machine that my publisher is working to get fixed. Don’t be fooled! The date is and remains Dec. 7.

Mustering the Street Team for that big day

In early September, I put out the casting call for kind souls who would have the time and the interest to help drive social awareness of Bane of All Things ahead of its release in December. Many of you have responded and signed up – thank you! If this includes you, we have of course already touched base, and I will be following up further through November.

If you are still looking to participate on the Street Team but haven’t connected with me about it yet, please drop me a line at leo@leovaliquette.com

Different ways that folks are participating on the Street Team include:

• Reading an advance digital copy that I have provided, so that they can then post a review on Amazon, Goodreads, etc. for Dec. 7. The goal is a positive review of at least 4 stars. But … I do not expect anyone to provide an endorsement they don’t feel is warranted. So, if after reading the book you decide to abstain from posting that review, no worries. I much prefer fair honesty to insincere flattery! I only ask that you delay by a week after the 7th posting your honest review.

• Pushing on social media on and around Dec. 7. I will help by providing draft content which Team members can then personalize as they see fit for their channels.

• Hitting up the local library, bookstore, or book club. For any author, getting your book in the library is a big deal, too. Plus, any word-of-mouth buzz with clubs and other local venues is as vital to a new author as water is to a soul lost in the desert.

• And I am of course open to any other ideas you may have.
  

My health

Tomorrow will mark four weeks since cancer surgery. My treatment and recovery continue to go well. I told you last time that the next step would be CyberKnife radiation therapy. This treatment did take place and conclude this past week without any issues or complications.

My largest complaints at present are really little things that, too, shall pass – side effects from medications that I must remain on for a couple more weeks before starting immunotherapy (and then we will see how my system handles that).

One current side effect is that I am holding lots of water weight. Kindly bear that in mind if you do tune into my WFC sessions this week and see my rather puffy face vs. the author photo of that leaner fellow with whom you may be more familiar .

That’s all for now. Thank you again for your continued interest and support. 

Stay safe and keep reading!

Dear Henderson House supporters,

Happy Halloween! I’m pleased to announce that on Friday, I received my Editorial Letter from the Inkshares team:) Can you believe it’s been eight months since Henderson House won the Inkshares 2020 All-Genre Contest? I know eight months seems like a long wait, but given everything in our world that has been slowed down or discontinued due to COVID, I think Inkshares is doing a wonderful job. I’m incredibly grateful and honored to be publishing with them.  I’m also thrilled with the insightful comments and specific suggestions in the Editorial Letter and can’t wait to dive back into the manuscript and take it to the next level.

"But when is the book coming out?" everyone keeps asking. The answer is: I still don’t know, but I do know a little more about what lies ahead.

The minimum time Inkshares gives an author to respond to the Editorial Letter is two months. The recommendations in the letter are not extensive, but they’re really good and they require soak time as they are developmental. My goal is to get my revisions to the team by early January. 

Once I send the revised manuscript, the Editorial Team will read it again and we’ll see if the book needs more development or if we’re ready to move into copy editing.

When the copy-editing phase begins, Inkshares might be ready to start talking about a target publication date. Sorry, I can’t be more specific, but getting a book to press is an iterative process. If the team thinks the manuscript needs more work in January, we will continue the read-through, editorial letter, and revision cycle until we all feel the book is ready for publication.

Trust me, I’m going to do everything in my power to completely knock it out of the park on the next draft and be ready to move forward. In the meantime, I probably won’t have much news to report on Henderson House until after the holidays.

You can follow the ups and downs of my writing adventures on my professional Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/CarenSimpsonMcVickerWriter/ 

Truly, I would not have a novel at this stage of publication if it were not for all of you, your pre-orders, your comments, and your engagement. We will get to hold this book in our hands and I am as excited about it as ever. Thank you again.

Cheers,

Caren

We have progress, ladies and gentlemen! Cat’s Paw has always been only a working title, one I’ve wanted to change for well over a year now. And we’ve come to a decision: the book formerly known as Cat’s Paw will be published as Unnatural Ends ... a far better title, mainly because it does not conjure up pictures of cute kittens when you run it through Google.

Which also means these updates will need a new header:

If you head over to Amazon, you’ll find we also have a cover, though my understanding is that this is not final. The cover artist is still working on something much better. Still, having even a placeholder cover brings home the idea that this is really happening after all. I’m sure that, given the time this has taken some of you must have begun to give up, or cease to believe ... I know there was a sense of unreality about the whole process for me as well, towards the end.

Meanwhile, the proofs have come and gone. I heard mention of printing at the beginning of the next month, though I’m assuming that’s about the Advanced Reader copies for reviews and the like before the actual release. As I said: we have progress.

Hey everyone,

I hope you’re all stocking up on pumpkin spice lattes, pumpkin spice donuts, pumpkin spice toothpaste, and pumpkin spice shampoo.

It’s been a few months since my last update but I wanted to wait until I had some news to share. I’m happy to say that now I do. Showtime will officially be released into the wild on June 28th, 2022! I’ve always thought that summer was the perfect season for it, so I’m happy to see it on the schedule for next year’s prime beach reading months.

Now that it has its own ISBN number (yahoo!), it’s now listed on Barnes & Noble and Amazon (CLICK HERE TO TAKE A LOOK) with more retailers to come in the future. The page is a little blank for now but will look more complete in the coming months with more product details, reviews and, of course, a cover reveal.

We’re still planning to start the last round of copyedits mid-October, and then it will be on to final stuff like cover design, interior layout, marketing, printing, and shipping.

Thanks for your patience and for sticking with me this long. We’re in the beginning of the home stretch now. :)

Ricky

Greetings friends and supporters. We’re certainly due for an update on the state of Tantalus Depths, and I am thrilled to say this update is a really good one.

About a week ago, I received my first round of copyedit notes for Tantalus Depths. They were wonderfully thorough and picked up a ton of minor punctuation and grammar errors that managed to elude my notice through more than a dozen full readthroughs. They were easily fixed, and the book feels much cleaner for it. 

You’ll remember that the development editing process took almost two years to complete, due to extensive rewrites and passing through multiple draft stages. Copyedits, I am happy to say, are much simpler and more straightforward, and mostly just involve clicking "accept" on every grammar change my copyeditor suggested. I made sure to read each sentence in context to ensure that none of the suggestions accidentally changed the meaning of the sentence, and I caught a couple that would have done so, but even with that close attention to detail, I am proud to say that it still only took me a few hours to make every single change expected of me for this stage of the process. While it took me months to get through a round of development edits, I was able to finish all my copyedit notes and send them back to my publisher in less than a week.

This very well may be the first time in our five-year development process where we’ve actually been ahead of schedule, and we are rapidly nearing the end. My copyeditor will go over the changes I’ve made, and barring one or two more potential correspondences to correct a few outstanding issues, we will soon be done with the copyediting process and be ready to move on to the proofreader. After that, Tantalus Depths will at long last be completely finalized and ready for its release.

It’s been a long road to get here, friends, but we are rapidly gaining momentum in the last stretch before the finish line. Expect some very exciting announcements in the next few months, including a cover reveal and our long-awaited official release date.

I never thought it would take this long to get this book into your hands, and I do hope future projects will move more smoothly now that I know what to expect. But I can definitely say with confidence that the book is ten times better now than it was before this process began, and I could not be more excited to see what happens when my world finally enters yours.

Stay tuned, my friends, and watch the skies.

The Void is calling...

I’ve been remiss in sending out updates as we worked on yet-another draft. But now, some news: The Man from Mittelwerk is finished (huzzah!) and slated for publication in the first half of 2022.

It only took three years, 13 drafts and several major rewrites. Nonetheless, the book went through final copyediting (2,600 changes, ulp!) which called out innumerable grammar and consistency issues. The editor also helped us strengthen the emotional impact in key scenes.  

It took several late nights of bleary-eyed Track Changes editing to work through the easy edits. Then I passed it to my brother and co-author to deal with the harder issues, while I was out cycling in the rain for a week. He got through it, undid many of my changes, and handed it back to me. I undid only a few of his changes, finished some items he didn’t want to touch and voila, a finished manuscript. 

The next step is for the text to be laid out in a proper design, followed by a final round of proofreading and getting a cover designed. Since we’re done with the writing, I built a web site with some mocked-up covers, created in homage to a few authors you might know.

I’m really proud of the what we’ve written. It’s been a lengthy process, but the book is all the better for all the revisions. I shared a copy with another tech industry author, Eric Maikranz and he said:

“The Man from Mittelwerk is a mind-bending thriller that will keep you turning pages.”
– D. Eric Maikranz, author of The Reincarnationist Papers

So not too shabby.

If you haven’t read Eric’s book I highly recommend it. It’s a fascinating exploration of reincarnation and what happens if you remember your past lives. His book was the basis for the Mark Wahlberg time-travel CGI extravaganza Infinity. (Spoiler alert: The book is better!)

As always, thank you for your support of this long-suffering project. Let me know what you think of the fake covers below, what you’re reading and how you survived quarantine. But don’t hit reply to this email. Instead email me at ZUrlocker@hotmail.com.

Cheers!
--Zack

CANCER UPDATE, OCT. 07, ‘21

Good day, everyone. Yesterday, I returned home from a surgery to remove the Melanoma tumor from my head. Surgery went well and the prognosis is good. Now, I face a couple of months of recovery at home and treatments with radiation and immunotherapy.

Bottom line: This is the first day of the rest of my life, and life is good.

The dark irony in all this is that my two main characters, Ryn and Josalind, each have “demons” of a sort in their heads. And it turned out that I did, too. But different than them, I can say at this stage that mine is easier to excise.

Thank you for all your support and good wishes.

Cheers

Leo