Dear friends:

Every once in a while, I get an e-mail from Inkshares with the subject line “You’re Selling Books.” Opening those e-mails is like opening a long awaited present. Those e-mails mean that a bookstore has decided to take a chance on my novel, and it will be carrying one or several copies of The Catcher’s Trap.

The first thing I do when I get those e-mails is googling the bookstore,  finding out where is located and then sending them a thank you tweet for taking a chance with a new author.

So far six independent bookstores will be carrying my book: A. C. Vroman, in Pasadena, Ca. Common Good Books, in St. Paul MN. Tattered Cover in Denver CO. Prairie Lights Book, in IOWA City IA, Mysterious Galaxy Books, in San Diego CA and Flyleaf Book, in Chapel Hill NC.

There are over sixteen hundred independent bookstores in the U.S. It would be a dream come true if all of them carry my book, but, in the meantime, I’m thankful for those 6.

Hopefully, a bookstore in my home state of Connecticut will take a chance on me.

I also dream about taking a road trip and visiting every single one of the bookstores carrying my book. So far my map looks like this:

My trip would cover 4 thousand miles and it will take 61 hours of driving. If I’m lucky, and readers love my book as much as I do, many other stops will be added. Maybe I’ll have to take a year off to cover them all. An author can dream, right?

 Have a wonderful weekend!

Hi everyone! I have things to tell you about!



First, Kris Calvin’s One Murder More is currently 99cents for Kindle. This was the first Inkshares book I read and I enjoyed it! I love murder mysteries, and I bet some of you do, too.

Amazon allows ebooks to be gifted via the wonders of the internet... so the first FIVE of my readers who like this update will receive the ebook of One Murder More as a gift! (Just readers who have purchased my book, not followers; this is a thank-you gift! And if you don’t have a Kindle, apparently Amazon has a free app so you can read it on your computer. I’ve never tried it, though.)

We all want to relax and chow down on a political thriller while we lounge on the beach (or something), right?!



Also, there’s a new syndicate in town, and it’s a book club!

For those who don’t know, syndicates are a sort of book-of-the-month thing where you pledge $10 (ebook) or $20 (print) to purchase a book agreed upon by the syndicate each month. If the price is different from the pledge, you are refunded the difference.

Elan Samuel’s Inkshares Book Club Syndicate will select and read a currently available Inkshares book every other month and discuss it together! Syndicates have mainly aimed to support currently funding books to help them get published, so one that selects available books is a new angle to take. Since it has to be monthly at this point, the syndicate will support funding books on the off months.

Consider checking it out!

FINALLY, a She Is the End update:

I have untangled the disaster that was Episode VIII, and Alex is currently doing developmental edits on Episode VII. I solved a problem in the final climax that was leaving the ending too weak, and in general we’re tightening things up, cutting like mad, and I AM SO. EXCITED. TO SEND THIS BOOK TO BETA READERS SOON.

And when I do, I will be taking a little break from writing. It will be... Art Time. I’m going to be sketching out the illustrations for my
book!!!

Until next time, my space-faring friends...

So it has again been a while between updates, but unlike last time, there has actually been some stuff going on. So I now present a multi part update:

Ghosts of War - I’ve gotten more done in the last 6 weeks or so than I had in the rest of 2016, so that’s a positive. Like, you can use 4 numbers to count the amount of words written. So I seem to be getting out the other side of this giant patch of writer’s block I’ve been in (NaNo did not work out...at all...), which is nice.

I’ve also set a deadline for getting a final draft into Inkshares. Plan is to get that into them by the end of July so that there’s enough time to get this thing into your hands before the end of the year.

Also, Inkshares recently launched their ’properties’ initiative which helps authors sell the rights for their works to people wanting to make TV shows, movies, audiobooks and the like. It’s a rather exciting thing for them to be doing and it’ll be interesting to see if anything comes from it for Ghosts.

LandFall - So this is my fantasy project that I hope to get to working on later this year. I had the idea up on Inkshares a while ago, but have recently bumped it into draft mode so I can put up a sample chapter. Also, while on a break day (read: lazy day), I made a mockup of how I’d love for the final LandFall book to look.

I will be pushing for this to be a 750 copy selling hardcover from the outset, which sounds...daunting...but I won’t be launching the campaign until I know I can get it done. I have some special plans for it.

You can check out LandFall here ---->;;;;;;;; https://www.inkshares.com/books/landfall

CORE - You might be wondering ’What is this CORE you speak of?’ 

Well that’s a pretty good question actually, and one to which the answer is changing all the time. At it’s core (I’m sorry), it’s the story I threw into the Nerdist video game contest on a whim a couple of weeks ago. It’s a really small nucleus of an idea, which is why I put such a long funding time on it (it currently has 346 days remaining), so that I have time to, y’know, work out the whole story and write the damn thing...lol

And I have been working it out. I’ve got several characters in place, and a beginning and an end that I’m happy with. Now to just work out the pesky middle...the middle is always a problem. 

But, since I have to finish Ghosts, and all chances of winning the Nerdist comp vanished almost instantly, the pressure is off a bit on this one for now, however if you want to check it out you can do so here ---->;;;;;;;; https://www.inkshares.com/books/core

Oh and here’s the (very, very) temporary cover for it.

So yeah, that’s the state of things as they are right now. I’ll do my best to not leave it another 3 months before an update. 

Until next time.