I lied. There. I said it. In my last update to you guys and gals I promised that a week forth I would have cool things to show you. Well, after a week I looked upon my works and thought to myself: "This is not cool enough. Not cool enough at all." Not for you fine sentient beings anyways. You deserved more than what I had wrought in the seven days that I had given myself.

Seven more days have passed and here we are again. This time, I gaze at my works and think: "This will do."

Before I show off a few pictures of what I'm working on, I have a few new followers, supporters and just plain amazing people who have pre-ordered The Life Engineered. So let me bring everyone up to speed: During the funding campaign for this book I made many promises to those who would pre-order copies of The Life Engineered before May 31st, the end of the Sword & Laser Collection contest. One of these promises was to raffle off a model of one of the robots from The Life Engineered which I had been working on. Now, there will be exactly eight copies of this model built and painted. The number is important and there will be subtle differences between each model. This is all relating to the character in the book and his evolution. I will, throughout the release of The Life Engineered in the next year or so be giving away most of these models, so if you didn't pre-order before May 31st and you're thinking "Hey! I'd like a chance at one of those!", don't worry, there will be other occasions. Assuming they turn out looking good enough for someone to want. So far though, it's looking up.

This is the upper portion of the main body of the robot. You'll notice the clown-car color scheme. Yeah, that's temporary.

Here are a couple of shots of the main body but with a plastic overcoat. See how the coverage isn't perfect? Don't worry about it. This piece is meant as a master to be cast into a silicon mold to make copies.

There are still a lot of interesting challenges in making this model. It's the first time I'm making something of that scale from scratch so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it turns out alright.

Enough about my toys, let's talk about books. Two short pieces of news:

That will do for now. I won't make any promises about future updates since my butt is still sore from having been bitten by my broken commitments, but I'm making molds and casting things for these models and I'm working on getting updated cover art for the book.

Thanks again for your support.

JF

Things are moving along smoothly as I slowly but surely work with Inkshares to bring The Life Engineered back to book form in an improved format. It's pretty exciting and all but I have to keep the brain busy on other projects.

Next month I'll be starting the second half of The Arch-Android, the sequel to The Life Engineered and I'm pretty stoked. In order to be of the proper mindset, I've immersed myself into the world of robotics once more, reading articles and other fiction on the wonderful world of artificial intelligence.

Earlier this week I stumbled onto a short piece on io9 that set my imagination ablaze. If you want a peek into how I came up with the ideas for Capeks and the future society of robots that populate the future in The Life Engineered, click here to read my blog post about the article, but mostly all the wild speculation I dive into.

I hope you enjoy both the blog post and your weekend. Hopefully Monday I'll have something cool to show you all.

JF

I'm still reeling from the events of last week. It was one thing to get the book published through the Sword & Laser Contest, but to be inducted into the Sword & Laser Collection is still hard to wrap my mind around.

So far, ever since I've written The Life Engineered it's gotten praise from friends, family and acquaintances. Sure, I had a few strangers tell me they liked it too, but while I appreciate the accolades, it's an unfortunate fact that validation from more critical sources simply feels more legitimate. Having you guys support my book and pushing it to such heights was inebriating enough, but having it picked up from there is mind numbing.

The good news is that Inkshares has been keeping me busy since then. Very busy. It's like I won a second job. One of the fears about Inkshares is that it might turn out to be little more then a crowdfunded vanity press. I'm happy to report that my fears have been alleviated! Inkshares has apparently no intention of letting me just print my book and distribute it through them! They seem intent on making sure The Life Engineered is as professional a piece of literature as it can be and is packaged and marketed as such. Not to go into boring details; my 'boss' at Inkshares has been asking me a lot of questions and making me fill out a lot of paperwork. Bottom line is that if you were excited about the book, I'm happy to report that it's probably going to be better then expected in the end. I feel like I'm in good hands.

I don't know how often I'll have things to report here in the coming weeks, but just so you don't feel like I took your pre-orders and ran for the hills, I've published an opinion piece on Artificial Intelligence on my blog. There's a bit of swearing, so brace yourself. A little. There's like two swear words, so calm down.

Again, thank you for your support. I'm super excited about where this is going and the work we're doing with Inkshares. More as things evolve!

JF