Greetings, Faoii!

First and foremost, Faoii, I want to thank you all for such an amazing year. So much has happened and changed during 2017 that I can’t even begin to recap it here. But you know what you’ve done to help me succeed--to help me keep going even when I didn’t think I could anymore. Now The Last Faoii is a real book and is in many of your hands. We’ve sold 387 copies according to Inkshares, and we’ve hit 30 reviews on Amazon. I can’t even believe it. A year ago, I didn’t think I’d ever see this book be real, and now I nearly cry just thinking about how far we’ve come. 

If you celebrate any sort of holiday around this time-- whether it be the Solstice, Yule, Christmas, or something else-- or even if you don’t celebrate anything at all, I hope that you find joy and beauty in your life and those you’ve surrounded yourself with. Because the world is beautiful, and you’ve helped me to achieve something magnificent-- I hope your own dreams prove to be as attainable. 

Keep those shields up, Faoii. I love you all.

Faoii-Tahani


Here’s a look at what you’ve made possible. Thank you again.

Good News Air Pirates!!

I just received the first copyedit back from the assigned editor at Inkshares.  Things are looking good.  I have to dig into the manuscript and clean things up over the next 2 weeks of the Holiday season but it’s a job that is worthwhile in making a better book for everyone.  We’re looking at a release date of May 2018 which is a great time to launch a female Indiana Jones type seaplane adventure in the South Pacific.  I’ll keep you all updated as things finally start to develop.  

Also check out my author page on Amazon.com for my Western novels and the new release of "Africa Tusk" - set in contemporary East Africa, one man defends the endangered population of elephants despite poachers and the influx of modern technology ...

Thank you all for your support!

Your dedicated Air Pirate Captain,

Eric H. Heisner

www.leandogproductions.com

Readers! Thank you so much for your support. I’m so thrilled that TWO syndicates backed my book this month! Thank you so much to the Great Sci-Fi for the 21st Century and Beyond Syndicate and the Staff Syndicate. I can’t even tell you how excited and grateful I am.

I sent out press releases about the Holton award this week, so there should be some media coverage coming! Check out my Facebook page if you haven’t already: facebook.com/caridubielauthor 

I’m also doing a giveaway that ends TODAY. You can still complete the reading survey and sign up for my email newsletter here: https://goo.gl/forms/VSrK7qmfa4tBZ5GH2

I have 214 responses so far! I am a huge data fan, so I’m really excited to go through all of those and share the results with my readers. If you want to sign up for the newsletter without doing the survey, you can do that too. Click here to sign up: https://mailchi.mp/4c50d1186a0b/signup

Happy weekend to everyone! I hope it’s a calm, peaceful one. It’s a non-working one for me, so I’m happy. Got some family time planned, as well as some reading and writing time. The only thing that would make it better is if I could get a babysitter so I could go see Star Wars...

Hello friends and supporters.

Well, NaNoWriMo has come and gone. It was not an altogether unprofitable month, though it was not as profitable as it should have been. I’m not sure who got the idea that the national novel writing month should be smack in the middle of the holiday season, but it’s not the most conducive of times for reaching lofty goals.

As I said, though, it was not unprofitable. I managed to write two full, reasonably sizeable chapters in Proteus, for one. As far as Tantalus Depths goes, I’d say I’m approximately 50% done with the current draft’s revisions. By that, I mean about 50% done with the changes I plan to make before turning the whole thing back over to my editor to see what he thinks of it. It’s possible he’ll want me to make additional changes at that point before we move to the next stage in the production process, but this draft is the one where the biggest changes will happen.

My current goal is to have this draft 100% finished by the end of the year. I doubt my editor will want to work on it during the holidays, but if I have work left to do at that point, I’m going to do it anyway. I am so ready to move ahead in this process it’s not funny. I really want to get through the monotony and frustration of editing so I can get back to the excitement of actual writing, but one thing at a time.

Hopefully my next update will signal the triumphant wrapping-up of my current draft and the next phase of the process. Stay tuned!

Exciting news! My new author website is now live! Check out https://deborahmunroauthor.com to see all the great content.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been working with my web designer, Mary Ann Aschenbrenner of Waterlink Web to create a fabulous new website to promote my book, tell you more about me as a person, share my other publications, provide interesting and meaningful content on how to use social media for marketing, discuss science related to APEX (https://www.inkshares.com/books/apex), and provide a portal to connect with me on various social media platforms.

Greetings, Faoii! Exciting update!

Our army’s first major reading is coming up on December 6. This will be The Last Faoii’s first public appearance since the launch party-- and thus the first one I expect for new people to attend. Reviews and orders have grown stagnant, and this might be the perfect thing to get people interested in our fight again. The holidays are coming, and I KNOW that The Last Faoii would make a worthy gift for many people out there-- but they need to know about it, first. Thus, I need YOUR help to spread the word. I’ll be raffling off 3 signed copies of the book at the reading. Come to Beautiful Montana and win one! 

Shields up

Faoii-Tahani

At ease, Faoii. This isn’t really an update. Instead, I’m sending out a reminder to all of you other hopeful authors out there who are working for a dream but constantly feeling like you’re just spinning your wheels.

I get it. It’s not easy. It’s exhausting and soul-crushing and painful. It feels like you’re giving everything you have and that you don’t even have dignity anymore after all the times you’ve begged and pleaded and prayed just to get this far. Then you get another rejection or one hurtful comment or the hundredth "seen" notification on your messenger feed that will just sit there without a response for the next six months (assuming that person doesn’t just straight-up unfriend you for being annoying) and you realize that maybe you did have some dignity left-- because it just got crushed a little more. I know you want to give up. I know how hard this is.

Don’t. Don’t give up, okay? Because some part of you still thinks that this is worth it-- that’s the part that keeps convincing you to send out one more DM, one more Tweet. That’s the part that keeps encouraging you to write one more sentence. Sometimes only a single word, but it tells you to keep going. And that’s the part that people are going to see and respond to. Don’t let it die.

If you follow my Facebook or my blog, you probably know that I’ve been feeling pretty burnt out lately. Blades, my last blog post might have been a full-on mental breakdown. And I kept asking myself the entire time "who can blame me for giving up here?" After battling armies on all sides during the crowdfunding phase of things, I thought this entire book thing would get easier. But then I fell short of the contest I was going for, my health failed terribly at the end of my campaign, and I didn’t have any idea how hard marketing would be. Trying to get people to review or even share posts about your book is an insane battle all on its own, and you start to doubt yourself. Maybe no one is sharing because I’m not a good enough friend. Maybe I really can’t write. Maybe this entire dream was stupid.  It’s mind numbing and heart-wrenching and terrible. 

And it’s wrong.

I’m sorry I forgot that, Faoii. I’m amazed that it took the help of others to remind me of what I’m fighting for. What we’re all fighting for. But today I got an amazing letter from a fellow Inkshares author that you should definitely follow. And I (for probably the millionth time) got more encouragement than I deserve from this Inkshares friend who has picked me up and dusted me off after every single fall thus far. (Make sure to follow him, too--of everyone I know, none are more deserving of happiness than he is). And between the two of them, I remembered something that I tried so hard to put into words when I was writing an entire book that it’s ridiculous that I might forget it myself. 

Keep going. 

Keep going. We forget sometimes that even our hardest moments can be beacons of light for others. Standing to face our demons can sometimes give someone else just enough courage to rise against theirs. Facing and overcoming challenges means proving to others that it CAN be done. And so, while we face our own challenges in hopes of overcoming them and forging ahead to our own future-- do not forget that by rising up, you may also be helping others to do the same. This book is greater than you, now, and has been since the first day you chose to put yourself out in front of the world and declare it worthy.

I know it’s hard, these demons you face on and off your book’s platform. But, whatever you’re going through--don’t be afraid to tell the world that it’s happening. Some might come to your aide (and hopefully many will), but if they don’t-- that might be because they just needed someone else to be strong for a while. You can be that person without ever knowing it.

One third of the way through NaNoWriMo and I’ve come to a revelation about myself: I don’t like editing.

It’s a whole different world from writing, and trying to pick apart a story you’ve written already and piece it back together in a way that works better is a phenomenally headache-inducing process. It’s necessary, and the results of the process will speak for themselves in the end, but gosh is it exhausting.

I wish I could say I’ve made a lot of progress on Tantalus Depths already, but it’s been very slow going. Most of the editing I’ve done so far has been in the form of outlining rewrites on problem scenes and trying to boil the entire story down to specific thematic elements so I can increase the consistency in theme and tone throughout. It’s slow but crucial work, and hopefully it’ll make the remainder of the process move much more smoothly.

To keep myself creatively inspired while working through the frustrating and tiresome work of editing, I’ve been doing a decent amount of work writing Proteus as well. Since the beginning of NaNoWriMo, I’ve managed to work through about a bit over a dozen pages in Proteus, and about two full chapters. I’m definitely not up to the recommended word count for NaNoWriMo, but since I’m dividing my attention between writing and editing, I feel like it’s a fair bit of progress.

My plan is to try and get the first half of Tantalus Depths edited by the 20th of the month, finishing it by the end of November. Somewhere in there I’d like to knock out another half-dozen chapters of Proteus if possible, but that remains a secondary priority.

Hopefully my next update will be an encouraging one. Back to work I go!