Whoa! My fellow thinking beings, what a ride the last few weeks have been. 

In case you haven’t heard, my second book, A God in the Shed, on Inkshares has funded successfully and will be seeing publication in a few months. It’s pretty exciting stuff but unfortunately I have no time to dwell on it. What else is taking up my thoughts?

DragonCon is starting its own awards. I won’t bury the lead; I want to see The Life Engineered nominated. I mean, I’ll be happy if any Inkshares book gets a nomination but obviously I’d be deliriously happy if The Life Engineered got a nod in there. So this will fusion reaction powering my communications with you for the next little while: Let’s get Inkshares a Dragon Award. Have a look at the nomination page and please consider putting in The Life Engineered for the Science Fiction category. While you’re there, here are some suggestions for other categories if you feel like supporting the Inkshares platform:

• Fantasy: Asteroid Made of Dragons
  
• Horror: An Unattractive Vampire

Click here for the nomination page.

Next up: one of my friends is nearing the end of her funding campaign and she is so very close to her goal of 250 pre-orders. I know I’ve been asking a lot from you guys lately, but if you have a few credits rolling around or you’re just curious about her book, check out A.C. Baldwin’s The Traveller’s Cup. It’s a great book and A.C. is a tremendously promising author and a tireless artist. She deservers this.

Finally, while I’m still asking for favours, currently The Life Engineered is sitting at 80 reviews on Amazon.com. That’s awesome and I love to read the comments and critiques of readers. However, if I can get to 100 reviews, magical things start happening on Amazon. If you’ve read The Life Engineered and enjoyed it, consider leaving a review on Amazon. It helps me more than you can imagine and I’d love you forever.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go prep the funding campaign for Arch-Android.

JF

Hey gang...

Some exciting mid-week news!

First, we’ll be introducing a brand new cover for Seeking the Elephant, this coming week, 4\28 (or a little soon!) Keep your eyes open for this exciting change!

Second, we’d like to announce -- Seeking the Elephant Pre-Order Raffle!

We’re almost 1\3 of the way to our Quills Goal of 250 copies! To celebrate, we want to announce a raffle -- We’re giving away a $50 Amazon gift card! You can use this card to buy anything you’d like, as a gift from the team behind Seeking the Elephant! How can you qualify? Purchase or recommend Seeking the Elephant in the next 10 days! Between NOW and 4\28, 12:00 PM PST, all orders & recommendations enter you into a drawing for this $50 gift card!

Here’s ticket quantities:

Asteroid Made of Various Information

[Sorry everybody, it’s time for a serious talk about the status of this crowdfunding project;  put plainly, I think it’ll take a miracle to get 189 backers in the month that remains.  The contest got me excited and I jumped the gun with this project.  We had a fantastic start, I really appreciate that, but just haven’t been able to keep up that pace.

So I’m going to pivot the business model, and today I started up a Patreon.

First thing’s first?  If this doesn’t reach that funding goal, you all get your money back, a full refund.  Don’t be worried about that!

Also, don’t worry about Over The Stars.  I’m still going to publish this , but it’s likely going to be either a Kindle Direct product with print-on-demand options, or I’ll go the Kickstarter route.  I’ll keep you posted as best I can.  The book will happen, and it will probably be a lot cheaper than $10 for an e-book, FWIW.

Some of what I have planned for this universe is shorter fiction, little vignette pieces that flesh out a character’s back-story, or show a different perspective on a major battle.

In order to support that (and other) short fiction, in order to go ’hands on’ with my writing and help shape some stories, in order to get unique geeky loot, and in order to be first in line to get updates on the status of Over The Stars, please consider supporting that new Patreon page.  

In the meantime, stay tuned here for a few more pieces of preview fiction, which I hope you’ve all been enjoying.  Thank you so much for trying to help get this project off the ground, and I’m sorry I couldn’t hit Inkshares’ pledge goals.]

Greetings Followers of the Space Sloth,

We have some new faces in the crowd tonight. Welcome all, and thank you for supporting my book. You can do something for me tonight and it won’t even cost you anything. The Hard Science Fiction contest is currently going on. Find a book that isn’t in the top ten and follow it. It can be discouraging being behind in a contest. Just having a new follower can pick up your spirits. So find something that looks interesting and give them a little support.

Now, back to Fortunes of the Space Sloth. I give you this short excerpt from Chapter 24:

Sebastian had finished with the supports and was now rummaging in his pack for something.  “In an ideal world I’d try to take this whole thing, but we don’t have time.  We’ll have to settle for one out of eight units and hope it can do something on its own.”  Finally he found what he had been looking for, a roll of tape.

“Duct tape?  Seriously?” Buttercup asked in irritation. “What do you expect to do with that?”

“This just isn’t any duct tape,” Sebastian began in his best info-vid salesman voice. “This is the new and improved, Spacer Duct Tape. When heated the polymers inside change shape to fill and seal and surface.” Then switching back to his normal voice, “I’m going to use it to seal the ends of these fluid tubes so nothing leaks out. Whatever this stuff is, it’s probably important.”

“That’s never going to work. We need to find some kind of clamp to use.” When Sebastian continued working with the tape she tried again to get him to see reason. “It’s just duct tape. It holds stuff together, it doesn’t stop leaks.”

“You better hope it does,” Sebastian mumbled under his breath, “it’s stopping several leaks on the Sloth right now.”

Hello, inksharians! Yes, another update! I hope everyone is tapping their inner muse and finding encouragement sand growth in the writings.

I am getting closer to publishing To Kill a King. Projected date is next month. This final revision is looking suweet! 

I will give away 3 signed copies of To Kill a King to three lucky people. Anyone signed up on my web page www.jodhanford.com has a chance to win. Follow me on www.jodhanford.com or on twitter @jodhanford for updates about To Kill a King, my debut novel.

Keep writing and keep dreaming!

Jodhan