Dear Henderson House Supporters,

The team at Inkshares asked for another week before delivering my Editorial Letter. Noah assured me that the extra week is in no way a reflection on the manuscript, they are just super busy. So, what is there to do but wait and keep writing. 

In sadder news, we had to say goodbye to our amazing rescue dog, Lola, over the weekend. We had thirteen incredible years with her and I’m not sure I ever would have finished Henderson House without her. We called her "Coach Lola" because once she learned a workout routine, she was brutal about making you stick to it. The same held true in her later years when I began my writing routine. Any morning I was puttering in the kitchen instead of heading up to my office to write, Coach Lola would start up the stairs and give me a little growl. "Let’s get going!" she would grumble. I can only hope she had time to instill the same work ethic in little June Bug. Rest in peace, Coach Lola.

B

Good Sunday morning! Tomorrow will mark two weeks since the surgery that removed a cancerous “plum” from inside of my head. I continue to do well and to improve every day. My outlook for both treatment and recovery are good.

The next stage in my treatment will be five consecutive days later this month of targeted CyberKnife radiation therapy. This should have few side effects or ill effects of any consequence.

This therapy demands high precision targeting and control which will require my own custom iron maiden mask … of a sort (example pictured below.) This mask will be used to position and hold me in place during the treatment sessions. I just might mount this war trophy on a wall somewhere with my pointy sword afterward!

After radiation therapy concludes, we will then begin with immunotherapy. As I have said before, this is a regimen of medications designed to train your body to better identify and fight cancer itself – teach a man to fish rather than just give him a fish.

Let me take this opportunity to say that the standard of care, consideration and professionalism that I have experienced throughout all this – from the surgical and other care teams at my local hospitals here in Ottawa, Canada – was and continues to be outstanding, despite the extreme pressures placed on the whole system by the pandemic.

AND … BIG NEWS FOR THE BOOK LAUNCH!

Two days after I returned home from the hospital, I got some unexpected and totally awesome news: I have made the programme for the World Fantasy Convention (WFC 2021) taking place early next month in Montreal (I’ll be attending virtually). This is pretty much the top event of its kind in the world.

To say this was great news at a great time is a gross understatement. I will be on one panel, and I have also been given a slot to deliver a reading from Bane of All Things.

I bought my ticket to WFC 2021 two years ago and applied to its programming in March with no expectation of what might come of it as a debut fantasy author with a small and unconventional US publisher. I could not have expected better.

And ... another great Canadian author has also been gracious enough to provide a promotional blurb for the book: 

"A dark and engrossing epic fantasy that starts off small but just keeps building. I’m really looking forward to what comes next!”

That comes from James Alan Gardner, author of They Promised Me the Gun Wasn’t Loaded. Check him out!

That’s all for now. I definitely feel that the cup is half full.

Stay safe and keep reading ;)

Cheers

Leo

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

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

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...

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

The House of Dust publishes today!

Supply-chain woes mean it’s displaying as "in stock soon" on many retail sites instead of "available now." So copies from Amazon, B&N, et cetera will arrive a little late. However, we do have copies in stock at Inkshares, so placing an order here would mean it’s shipped right away...

To anyone who’s already read, THANK YOU! Share your thoughts on Amazon, B&N, Goodreads, or wherever. You always here authors say it, and I’ll say it too: reviews really do help. 

And thank you to everyone who followed the project on its long journey to today.

Noah

Young Donald just passed Jane Eyre on the Goodreads "Best for Book Clubs" list  (suck it, Charlotte Brontë!). It’s now #28 out of more than 8,000 books on that list.

Thanks for all the fabulous support! If you haven’t had a chance yet to rate or review Young Donald, you can do that at:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54772271-young-donald

Michael