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!

As promised, a long overdue weekend update.

I’m currently working to get the 2nd issue of my newsletter up and ready to send out by 5/1, and was happy to make my self-imposed deadline by sending out the 1st issue on 4/1 complete with a map sketch, bit of talk about the future of Exile, Magus, a dialogue between two characters which shed a bit of light on two ancient civilizations mentioned in Magus - Melexi and Thirosia, and a darkly comedic short story poking fun at a few tropes.  For any of you who are interested in reading that first issue then sign up for the newsletter before 4/30.  On 4/30 I’ll send out the April newsletter again to everyone who has signed up after it was sent out.  On 5/1 I’ll send out the May newsletter of course.

What about the progress of Exile, Magus?  Well, its mainly the super dull background work right now.  Polishing, contacting artists, and so on.  For any of you wondering if I’ll be making another go of trying to fund on Inkshares, yes I will.  I just want to make sure I’ve got a full strategy in place instead of jumping in blind again, so for now I’m focused on the dull background work which is why I’ve been so very quiet as of late.  Don’t worry though, I’m still here and I’m still working.

That’s all I’ve got for today, so thanks for your time, have good weekends everybody, and of course keep reading and enjoying!

Hi all!

There are a few thing i would like to talk with you about in the weekend update...

But ! First thing first. This is now your chance to be the lucky guy who will shoot the book to being published as we are standing at the moment (Saturday 6:39 London time) on 249 orders!

*** In fact to get you guys ordering - lucky 250 will have his name featured in the novel as a minor character! so i will have to tweak things around (as i said it is already well written). ***

I will come back to update as soon as this happens! 

x

Jonathan

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.  

Including today, we have six days left to fund this project.

The next few days are going to be very important. In six days, I celebrate the end of this campaign, whether it is a success or a failure. I’ve already pulled out the bottles of celebratory whisky. The results of the campaign will decide if I’ll be drinking from the first bottle, or the second.