Machiners!

We have entered Winter, officially speaking, but the weather is hardly frightful and our spirits are so delightful. What a day! 

First and foremost, my congratulations to Tony Valdez on reaching 250 pre-orders for his comedic SciFi romp Dax Harrison!  Meaning books will be on the way! This is really well deserved. Great concept, awesome writing, hard work - check all the boxes. Also, amazing to see how the Inkshares community really banded together to push a colleague toward the finish line. Love it. 

OnThe Last Machine front the beat goes on and such a groovy beat it is. 

The Review-a-Thon this past Saturday was fantastic. Thanks to A.C. Weston for coordinating which undoubtedly took much time and effort. It yielded some amazing reviews for the novella, which I am very thankful for. Some of them I have been able to reciprocate already. Others I haven't gotten to yet. But I will. I promise. Thanks to Michael Valdez, AR Patterson, Jason Pomerance, Dave Barrett, and Byron Gillan for their wonderful words. It really does mean a great deal.

We've now surpassed 80 readers!! Thank you to all the new followers and supporters. Because we hit 75, I've conducted a clandestine raffle of unknown scope and substance....

And the winners are Melissa Berg and Peter Birdsall. You have each won a signed copy of Alter Ego No. 91 from January 2010. It's a super cool magazine and has an epic interview covering basically every topic possible with my friend and The Last Machine artist Jack Katz. Here are a couple of images for you:

We're at 81 readers so we might as well shoot for 100. Yeah, why not? Maybe we can do that by Sunday? Let's try. More cool stuff to come if we make it.

This past week was absolutely packed with things both related and unrelated to Inkshares.

Most of it was unrelated, which slowed work on the novel, but was mostly family-related and took top priority. Thankfully, I was able to pump out some reviews for the Review-a-Thon yesterday, but not nearly as many as I wanted.

A huge thanks to Jamison Stone, Yicheng Liu, Jeyna Grace, Joshua Griffith, Thea Tiffany Alger and Kelly Graniel, Stephen Carignan, Steve Soldwedel, and Jason Pomerance for posting reviews of my novel. All of your lovely words made this writer extremely happy!

As I said on the Facebook Review-a-Thon page, I promise to return the favor by writing reviews for all of your novels, but it takes awhile to read all of your wonderful projects, so please be patient with me. I want to give you the most honest and informed review possible. I already bounced back a couple reviews today, so hopefully that will help out your projects a little.

I'd also like to thank Cara Weston for putting the event together. The whole event generated nothing but positive results, and not only did I walk away from it with a page full of reviews, but I also won a copy of Scrivener software to help me organize my writing better! The event also exposed me to other projects that I'm glad I was able to discover through this experience. There's a lot of amazing stuff out there!

In regards to the novel, I am so happy to have bypassed the 30 pre-order mark! Boom! Thank you so much to all my supporters! You are the fuel to my wordsmithing fire.

I do have many words committed to Chapter 4 already as I've been combing through it again with new ideas. I'm constantly being inspired to explore new routes to the same story as I revisit old drafts of these chapters, and finding new ways to approach the universe I've built in my head. It is gratifying for me to deliver improved material to you and get good feedback in return. For Chapter 4 in particular, I decided to take it down a darker path than originally written. You will see when I post it.

Anyhow, I will update all of you with more as it comes along.

Have a good night, and happy dreaming!

Hello hello!

Time is moving so quickly. Work, work and more work.  But I managed to find time to clean up the prologue and chp 1-5 quite a bit more.  And below is the book blurb I finaly decided on.  I wish everyone a happy holiday!

Magic. Jerimiah has always has been told such a thing don't exists in the real world and to leave that for his video games. He knew he should listen and accept that as truth. However, on his 8th birthday something horrible happens that changes everything.

Four years later, destiny reunites Jeremiah to home where it began, the home of his grandfather Victorio. Now nightmares that used to plague his dreams return to haunt him once again; two cloaked figures arguing with his grandfather in their backyard, attacking him in ways he could only explain as magical.

Suddenly, strange and unexplainable things begin to happen at the house. Things that will make Jerimiah question everything he knows about his family and the world itself.

Hey folks, Matt here.

So, we just launched our campaign for THE KNIGHT PROPER, and while we’re unfortunately out of Starbucks cards to raffle off, we wanted to throw an extra bonus out there for any fellow Inksharians who pre-order our book. Noticing that a lot of you out there also write screenplays or you’re thinking about writing screenplays, our offer is this…

For this week only, anyone who pre-orders our book will also get notes on their logline, their outline/treatment or the first ten pages of their script – you can also gift this for any of your screenwriting friends if you’d prefer that instead. Now, I’m just one more lousy voice/subjective opinion out there in the wilderness, but I have a produced credit under my belt and I teach the stuff, so hopefully it’s helpful in some small degree.

Just pre-order, then send the first ten pages of your (or your friend's) script (or the logline or treatment) to theknightproper@gmail.com - I should be able to get them back to you within a week, if not sooner. If you have any questions, feel free to email us there as well. Thanks again for all your support and happy holidays!