Dear friends and followers,

It has been a while since my last update. August has been quiet; I admit to having distanced myself somewhat from the campaign. And now I’m just back from spending the last two weeks out west visiting mom.

This is my mom’s dog, Ernie. Ernie is sad because "Murder at the Veterans’ Club" has not yet hit the magic 750 mark. Poor Ernie.

So, we’ll be ramping up again over the course of the week and be back in full gear by week’s end. I hope I can count on your support.

In the meantime, I’d like to draw everybody’s attention to the following projects:

1) "Tantalus Depths" by Evan Graham. I’ve mentioned this book before, and I’d like to reiterate my support. It’s got horror, intrigue, mysterious outside forces, a feel for the ensemble, and solid prose. Every so often, there’s a book that will please readers who normally dislike the genre, and I think this might be it.

2) "The Darkest Places" by Byron Gillan. Here’s a book I’ve been excited about for a long time. It’s a classic cosmic horror as Lovecraft did it, and is set in the 1920s to boot. And yet, not derivative: Gillan promises a more thoughtful examination of the concept of "the Other", and that has me excited all over again.

3) "The Seventh Age: Dystopia" by Richard Heinz. Heinz has been around much longer than I have, and his first book, "The Seventh Age: Dawn", is slated to hit the bookstores in January. "Dawn" dealt with the return of magic to the modern world; "Dystopia" explores the ramifications some years down the road. I’ve worked with Heinz in "Too Many Controllers", and I can tell you he knows how to craft a story and how to tell it. With "Dawn" and "Dystopia", I promise you won’t be disappointed.

And now, I’d like to leave you with this video of me reading Siegfried Sassoon’s "Aftermath". How do I sound? Not too awful? One day ... one day! ... I shall finally get a book trailer up on my project page. Until then ... have fun! Keep reading!

It’s been a long and interesting summer, now drawing to a close as the leaves change color on the trees. I had the opportunity to do a podcast with a local outfit. It was a really nice time. We talked about life in the military and life in Korea, and had a good opportunity to discuss the state of publishing today and the life of an aspiring creator. Check it out!

http://www.changwoner.com/episode-39-writing-fiction-south-korea-brendan-thompson#.V9TTGpzeTlo.facebook

Followers!

There are a lot of you. I don’t know where you are, but if any  of you happen to be attending Rose City Comic Con today, I’ll be there. Come findd me and say hi! I look like this:

If find me, say "Molemen Rising." First three to do so get a prize! Hurry! They’re heavy!

Rise is in the wild!  Many of you have already received your copy and have sent images of the book to me.  Thanks for that.  I was in the throes of Post Con Depression following Dragoncon when these images began rolling in.  Instant boost to the happiness scale.

Well guys, that’s it. SQUIDS IN has failed to reach its publication goal! 

The good news is that every single person who supported this project by throwing down some cold hard cash will get it ALL back. That’s right, every last penny will be refunded to you at somepoint over the next couple of days.

 Well my friends, we did not win a Dragon Award. I was however at the ceremony and must say, it’s a privilege to have been nominated in the first year. There was a level of class (though some tremendous mispronunciation of my name) in these proceedings.

The Dragon Awards, if the they follow this course, may just be the classy award for fan favourite media that we’ve been hoping for. Not that other awards aren’t great, but Dragon Con has always been ’the people’s con’ and having been there myself, I can see why. So it makes sense that their award would follow that ideology.

In other news, I have to apologize. I had grandiose plans to have the campaign for Arch-Android, the sequel to The Life Engineered, ready for this coming weekend. I can’t say that this will be possible. Other obligations have piled up and I have to postpone. Worry not, the campaign is coming and the book will be in the spirit of the first one.

Thanks again for your continued support. Next year... we’ll get that award next year.

JF

I want to do something a little different this week for my reader updates.
I’ve been slaving away at this campaign for five whole months now, with more than another whole month to go. It’s been exhausting, at times very discouraging, and always very stressful. I’ve been hit with huge obstacles that threatened to bring the whole campaign down, and yet in spite of all that, I’ve come really far. This campaign has grown and become something I honestly never really believed it could. We are, in spite of it all, well on our way to full funding, and I do believe we’ll get there.
I’ve worked my butt off to get here, and you’ve all been immensely supportive. That, honestly, is where the real credit goes. No matter how much time and effort I put into this campaign, it couldn’t have gone anywhere at all without the incredible support from friends and strangers alike.

But not everyone on Inkshares gets that kind of response to their projects.

An unfortunate but inevitable aspect of the Inkshares platform is that, just by nature of how crowdfunding works, it isn’t strictly a meritocracy. People who are good at campaigning stand a better chance of hitting their publication goals than people who are good at writing. I, for one, freely admit that I am terrible at campaigning. I’ve gotten this far as much from luck as anything else. But not everyone here is lucky. I’ve seen so many promising books fail to hit their goals simply because they could not find their audience.

Well...I have an audience. I’ve amassed a surprisingly decent-sized following. Obviously I still need that following to grow larger before Tantalus Depths will be able to get fully funded, but I’m getting there, and I have time. 

So this is what I’m doing this week: for this week, I’m taking a break from actively campaigning Tantalus Depths (at least as far as my reader updates go) and I’m going to spend it trying to bring projects to my supporters’ attention. Each day, until the end of the week, I’m going to highlight a different book that I think really deserves at least as much attention as mine. Please check them out, and seriously consider supporting these projects. Each of them is extremely promising and fully deserves your notice.

I’m kicking this week of recommendations off with One of the tenacious top 3 books in Geek and Sundry’s Fantasy Contest: Storm Song

(This awesome cover was made by another Fantasy Contest top-ten placeholder, Kaytalin Platt, author of The Living God. Check her out too.)

Storm Song forgoes the obvious Tolkeinesque high-fantasy route favored by so many of the fantasy contest’s less original and distinctive entrants in favor of a much simpler, yet endlessly promising premise. This is a story of adventure on the high seas: a true tale of swashbucklery.

It’s a tale of luck (good and bad), of discovery, of danger, daring, and dark magic. The book reads like an old salt’s tall tales in a seaside tavern; Allison’s writing has an effortless flow that almost makes you hear the deck boards creak beneath you, feel the roll of the waves and smell the salt in the air. Storm Song may very well have been transcribed directly from some old forgotten sea shanty and set down expertly in narrative form for our enjoyment. Reading the sample chapters is enrapturing: you’ll finish reading her excerpts before you fully realize you’ve begun.

If you’re interested in an epic tale of seaborne wonder and adventure, place a pre-order for Storm Song. You’ll never regret it.