Readers,

Happy Tuesday, Space Crew! 

First, to start things off properly, I need to give a space-sized congratulations to my friend JF Dubeau, who’s successfully funded his second book, A God in the Shed. 750 orders with a few days to spare. Congratulations! 

Onto Cup news! I used to think we had a lot of time. Wasn’t it just yesterday I was saying there was a month to go? And now we only have half that. 

I know a lot of you are followers who haven’t picked up a copy. But time is running out, and the best way you can show support is to place your orders before the funding period ends. 

Those who have ordered, let me remind you what’s in store with your Recommendations. If you’re one of the top three Recruitment Officers you’ll be receiving this prize pack: 

So join me in shamelessly spamming this book everywhere. I want my social feeds so filled with this book that I miss out on more interesting things and complain for a moment before remembering how grateful I should be.  

 
Your Spam-Spamming Space Spamtain,
-AC

Dearest Annabel,

My love, I must accept the fact that I will never lay eyes on you again. It is a hard truth but it is truth. I will never hold you again. Never taste the sweet nectar that is your kiss. Never walk hand in hand with you in our beautiful spring gardens. Never hold you close in moments of outrageous passion. This realization, more than anything else, has brought me to despair. I need you to know my intentions were pure. If you believe nothing else my dear heart, believe that. My entire life has been dedicated to this project. This impossible dream. I hoped to make a better world for you. A better world for everyone.

But I totally screwed the pooch on this one darling. Like it’s really, really bad. It didn’t work at all. I really thought opening that dimensional portal would be a good idea. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine freaking monsters would come out. So many monsters. Holy crap.

I can hear them gnawing through the blast doors now. Soon they’ll have me and my life will end in swift and undignified agony. I shall wait for you my dear. Across the river of death in the valley of eternity. I will wait until I can hold you again. If you’ll have me. I fear my wait will be a short one because Ted’s dumb ass left the teleporter turned on. For all I know these foul beasts have already stumbled into it and teleported home. In which case you may already be dead.

In which case… my bad.

Yours forever, Archie

As promised here is the first of the remaining four crew write ups. Allow me to introduce you to the resident mage, Cassius. I apologize if the formatting came out oddly, trying to do this from my phone. 

Powerfull, respected, and sought after. These are the traits most often associated with a Ship Worthy Mage of the Corporate Council Academy. Despite his desires these are not how people think of Cassius, the human Worthy of the freelancer ship the Void Hawk. Instead the see a brash and frivolous youth that seems to be unaware of the power he wields. This is especially true for those with a well trained eye, since they can see that his tattoos aren’t quite complete. For someone to make it that far into the Academy’s worthy program and be expelled is a disturbing sign to these more disciplined Magi. 

Cassius is a tempest of power despite his abriged stay at the Academy, able to outlast other Ignis Magi with much more experience even though he lacks in fine control of his art. This dynamic is also prevalent in his social graces, or lack thereof. Being young, brash, and cocky means that there is always a quip at the tip of his tongue even at the most inappropriate times. The only time this changes is when one of his fellow crew members, usually Corrs, sends him into a brooding fit. 

Despite not being a true Worthy, Cassius has managed to find friends and a home as part of Captain Felist’s crew. Even though they don’t always get along, Corrs, Brachen, and Felist cannot deny that Cassius has more than pulled his weight as a freelancer. The camaraderie, however, has still not stopped Cassius’s desire to truly be declared a Worthy by the Academy.

I don’t usually do two updates in one day but...

WE FUNDED!

So let me make something clear: I use the term ’we’ when talking about this campaign because while I write the book, it’s your support and encouragement that makes it happen. These aren’t empty words meant to artificially include you and make you feel like part of the process. The whole point of Inkshares is that this is a community effort. A symbiotic endeavour between reader and writer to help create works of fiction and bring them to the public.

There are a lot of people who have gone above and beyond for this to happen and I’d like to highlight at least three that can benefit immediately from your support:

John Robin, the author of Blood Dawn, spearheaded community efforts to rally people together after I called for help from fellow authors. John is a hard working writer and a helluva guy. Check out Blood Dawn and support it.

Andre Brun, my CEGEP buddy and author of Lies & Deception campaigned for me harder than I could campaign for myself. He leveraged his own book and his salesmanship skills to gather a ton of pre-orders and get A God in the Shed in front of many new pairs of eyes. Lies & Deception is a terrifyingly ambitious book that deserves your attention. Check it out.

Paul Inman, my cohost on WriteBrain and author of Ageless also lent a hand and was a big part of the community, leveraging the release of his own book to help get visibility for A God in the Shed. Check out Ageless, I read it and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Finally, let me plug my buddy Brian Guthrie who was a great help and is currently participating in the Geek & Sundry Hard SciFi contest on Inkshares. Check out his book After Man and support it with all your heart (and pre-orders).

More soon as thing develop and, as promised:

JF

Here we are almost two weeks ahead of schedule and my re-writes and fixes for The Bones of the Past are finished! Not only that, but after struggling with my acknowledgements, I have finished all the associated paperwork and writing Inkshares and Girl Friday Productions need to get the ball rolling on their end. All of this means I should have a schedule for edits and even a tentative publication date sometime in the next few weeks!

I had also been toying with the idea of including a map but hadn’t managed to find an artist that felt like the right fit for my book. Little did I know he was in front of me the whole time. My amazing map was drawn by non-other than John Robin, the author of Blood Dawn (if you haven’t pre-ordered his book yet you can and should do that HERE!). The hand-drawn style perfectly fits with the flavor of my world. I hope you like it!

Thank you all once again!

I’ve made some progress on the concept art for Soulblade, I have still been getting my head around Corel painter and my new Wacom tablet with all the new brushes that I haven’t been able to get with my bog standard Photoshop CS2.

While it has been over a week since my last update, I wanted to let you know of a project that’s very close to it full funding goal (29 pre-orders away ladies and gentlemen) and with only a few days remaining I wish to express how much this book should really get it full publishing.

Check it out: A God in the Shed by J-F Dubeau is a Fantasy/Horror story set in the forgettably small village of St-Ferdinand, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. The villagers have been hiding terrible secret for generations, but when their mysterious captive escapes but gets inadvertently trapped in the McKenzy’s backyard shed, it’s up to the Venus and her friends to figure out how to dispose of this terrible and malevolent burden; an Old God of hate and death.

You can find out more about this dark and beautiful, read sample chapters, reviews and pre-order you copy of A God in the Shed by visiting: www.inkshares.com/books/a-god-in-the-shed

You can listen to the prologue as read by Ageless author Paul Inman here: youtu.be/XJw5oZhqtXo

Need more incentive?

• Each pre-order enters you into the ‘I want to kill a reader’ raffle. The winner will have his name and likeness used in the book as a minor character that gets killed off. The author will work with the winner to find the appropriate means of demise to satisfy both the winner and the story.

• Each physical copy of A God in the Shed will be signed and numbered as an exclusive first edition item.

• Free, exclusive A God in the Shed bookmarks will be included with the physical copies and mailed to eBook supporters.

• Orders of three or more copies guarantees your name to appear in the Patrons list printed at the end of the book.

• You get to enjoy the satisfaction and pride at having supported both art and literature.

After some recent discussions, I felt the need to post this to the project page and send it as an update.

What this Book is NOT:

First, this is not a book meant to answer all the questions.  This world the story takes place in is a complicated place where everything has changed owing to the cataclysmic event.  As a result, everything you know about society, religion, politics, genders, gender roles, and much more has changed.  Second, this book is not "women can’t go on without men."  Having lived for 500 years without them, clearly they can.  This book is an exploration of that idea: what would it be like if you take the most basic form of diversity and remove it?  And then what might happen if you reintroduce it?  How would society react?  Third, this is not an anti-feminist diatribe.  It is also not a Complementarian manifesto.  The idea here is NOT to declare one gender is better than the other, or that they can only exist together if they exist in a specific mold.  The idea behind it is to explore what would happen if such an event were to occur, not pass judgment on you or anyone else for how they view or believe on this subject.  Finally, this book is not going to tell you what to believe or accept about it.  This will have a lot of ambiguity in it ON PURPOSE.  This is not to avoid conflict, but to avoid "leading the witness."  The narrative is going to have a lot of opportunities to make small and big statements throughout.  Places where we can hit you right in the face with something just because we want to.  We won’t be doing that.  The idea here is to create a setting where all of these preconceived notions we carry into our interactions with each other have all fundamentally been altered or vanished.  We all are going to approach this story with differing world views and beliefs.  That is fine.  The goal of this story is to take you as you are and, on the other end, leave you where you choose to be after contemplating the ideas and possibilities herein.