Hey everyone, it’s time for another update from your’s truly. 

First off, I wanted to just take the chance to post this great sketch of ~Euwin Cohmwell~ which will be included in The Children of the Forest’s art booklet. This is the first of three pieces, all drawn by the wonderful Andy Barry. I quite like his style, and can’t wait to show off the other two scenes he will be drawing for the booklet. 

Secondly, I have the names of the two chosen winners who will both have a chance to create characters for The Children of the Forest! Barbara Heathcock and Thomas Arnold, you are the lucky winners. I will be reaching out to each of you shortly, to oversee that process. So congratulations, and I look forward to hearing your input!

Finally, work continues on the book. I have begun edits, and looking ahead, March will be devoted to coming as close as possible to finishing the manuscript for final edits. My general updates will be fairly limited until the novel is finished, but I will occasionally drop by to update things where needed, and keep backers informed about the status of the work. I want to thank everyone again for backing The Children of the Forest, and I promise the wait will be worth it~~!

BIG NEWS everyone!

I have a shiny new homepage: www.jasonchestnut.com

You’ll find links to my short stories, a new blog I’m starting as well as a nice little "contact me" form. I will be having my custom domain livedieavalon.com that I have on my business cards and promotional materials forward to the homepage from now on, which I think looks very nice indeed. 

Also! I’ve commissioned professional illustrator/comic book artist Nathan Anderson to create a full-color portrait of our hero Penny Thorne! He’s not done with it yet, but to get an idea of Nathan’s style, check out some of his previous work on his blog at nathanandersonart.tumblr.com

I will be producing THREE high-quality posters of Nathan’s portrait and will give those away to the top three referrers! That’s right, if you haven’t pre-ordered yet or you’d like to help me get the book to at least my quill goal, go out there and refer like crazy! Make sure you use the email referral link on the project page so that I can track who is making the most referrals. If and when we get to Quill I will be sending those posters out to the lucky three winners.

Don’t forget, anyone who pre-orders also gets a covert art magnet! They have not arrived from the printer just yet, but I expect them sometime this week and will contact all of my readers for shipping info!

Thanks again everyone for all the support! LET’S DO THIS!

-Jason

Hi, everyone. It’s been a nice little stretch, lately. Disintegration is only seven copies away from 400!

Many thanks to those recent purchasers (and, of course, to all of you who have already supported my book). Some of the recent orders have come from authors participating in the current Nerdist Space Opera contest!

Be sure to check out The Life Interstellar (if you remember Verhoeven’s RoboCop, you’ll love the narrative voice of this story. Zack Jordan is doing a great job with world-building. Follow his book and be entertained by his updates!), The Traveller’s Cup (I love the premise of this story: it has a bit of a Hunger Games feel, but the scope is much grander and it involves SPACE DRAGONS!), Infinity Mind (its plot is reminiscent of Philip K. Dick’s "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale". Mars. Brainwashing. But ... Assassins!) and Champions of the Third Planet (this book is the contest leader. In this tale, five kids band together to save Earth from a faraway threat).

Please, if you haven’t yet ordered a copy of Disintegration, do so now. Help me reach another milestone in my quest to be a fully funded Inkshares author, with all the rights and privileges that affords (Fame! Fortune! Or, at least, royalty checks and rigorous editing!).

Support art and artists! Support independent authors (me! the people I mentioned above!) and publishing companies (Inkshares!).

That is all. :)

We know, we know -- we never call, we never write anymore. Well, that last part isn’t true, we’re still writing, we just haven’t been sending you updates. So here’s what’s up:

ENHANCED has received some very positive professional feedback through a couple other contests we’ve entered where the judging is based on the quality of writing and not on how relentlessly the author pushes their friends and family and total strangers to pre-order it.

There are still a few contests we’re waiting to hear the results of, most notably the Book Pipeline Contest that’s looking for new authors’ works that would adapt easily to film or television. We should find out if ENHANCED has risen to the Semi-finalist level mid-March, AND they include a page of professional feedback for each submission.

We’re also waiting to hear from Her Universe Press -- well worth investigating, especially for female scifi authors! Plus, they promise to respond to every submission whether they choose to publish the work or not.

We’re finally happy with our Query letter and the devilishly tricky 1 page Synopsis. We have a polished -- but we’re not claiming perfect -- manuscript that’s ready for an agent’s love.

So that’s where we are, sending our baby out into the world, to eventually take an honored place in the hearts of millions of readers.

We hope one of them some of them will be yours.