Hello, everyone! 

If you qualified for a giveaway during Funding, I’ll be messaging you in the next month for your address so I can get that to you! 

In the next two weeks, I’ll be passing the manuscript off to Inkshares for publication. That is exciting as well as terrifying. After I pass it off, it will be around 6 months before the novel is in your hands. I’m 11 chapters into the rewrite of the sequel, The Book of Kings. I’d share it with you but... spoilers. I’m not sure when to start sharing information on the second novel. I’d like for the first one to land in your hands before I start sharing chapters or synopsises for the next one, for obvious spoiler reasons. A lot happens towards the end of The Living God, and I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you. 

 I also noted a cool little thing at the top of The Living God page. It is the 16th best selling Fantasy book on Inkshares. Do you think we could get it in the Top 5 once it’s in print? Hmm... 

I’ll be in touch! 

Today’s big announcement has almost nothing to do with Tantalus Depths, but it is still a very big announcement.

As many of you already know, Inkshares is teaming up with Nerdist right now to host a science fiction novel contest. The top three books at the end of the contest will win the full publishing treatment, the same deal we earned for Tantalus Depths last year, but without the agonizing process of having to round up 750 preorders first.

I deliberated for weeks about whether I should enter the contest or not. The book I wanted to enter is one of my boldest endeavors and I’m incredibly proud of it, but in many ways I feel like I’m still recovering from my last campaign, and I’m definitely not excited about taking that plunge once more. But ultimately the deciding factor that made me decide to go ahead and go for it was the competition. Right now, with just 20 days to go, the pre-order numbers on the current leaderboard are unusually low for a contest like this. At the time of writing this, I could make it to the top 3 with less than 50 pre-orders. That’s a far cry from 750, and I feel I must capitalize on this opportunity.

So I’ve entered the fray: my second full novel, Proteus, is now available for pre-order. It’s a sci-fi psychological thriller set in the same universe as Tantalus Depths, but featuring completely different characters and events. It’s ambitious to the point of impertinence, as it is a direct adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Richard III that also deals with themes of wartime PTSD, transhumanism, and the duality of man.

I can’t do anything halfway, it seems.

Here is the link, please check it out. There will be a wealth of new information coming every day for the duration of this intense but very short campaign. I wouldn’t have entered this contest yet if I didn’t think we could win it. The support we raised for Tantalus Depths was simply mind-blowing, and if we can recapture just one fifteenth of that miracle again, we’ll have not one but two books entering the production process. This could make the difference between me being an author as a hobby and me being an author as a career.

Before you go, I want to pre-emptively answer some questions I expect will be raised by this announcement:

Q: You jerk, I already ordered a book and I still don’t have it. WHERE’S MA BOOK???

A: It’s coming! I sent the manuscript in about a month ago. It takes months for a book to go through the production process, and that timer doesn’t begin until the manuscript is submitted. Tantalus Depths will probably not be released until the end of the year at the absolute earliest, more likely early next year. BUT anyone who’s ordered it and is particularly eager to get their hands on a copy and doesn’t want to wait until then, I will happily send you the current draft upon request. If you don’t mind reading an in-process manuscript, that is.

Q: What happens if you lose the contest?

A: You get your money back. If I fail to place in the top three, I could continue to campaign the normal way until I raise enough pre-orders (that’s exactly what happened with Tantalus Depths) but there’s no way I’m putting myself through that right now. I’ve set my campaign to only run one week past the end of the contest, at which point it will expire and anyone who ordered a copy will be immediately refunded. Either I win this contest, or nothing. Not until a future date when I’m more ready for it.

Q: How will this campaign affect the production of Tantalus Depths?

A: It won’t. Tantalus Depths is top priority. The only reason I have time to campaign right now is because I’m still waiting to be assigned a production team; at the moment, there’s nothing I can do for Tantalus. During the production process, there is a lot of going back and forth between me and my editor, so there will be patches of time when I will be working on Tantalus and when I won’t be. Any time I have to choose between working on Tantalus and working on Proteus, Tantalus will always take priority.

Any other questions or concerns, feel free to message me about them.

 Hello everyone
Hope everyone is well as summer begins to kick into gear. A new contest has taken over Inkshares and I’ve been blown away by some of what has been entered already. I thought about putting up one of my sci-fi stories myself but decided to keep focusing on this story for now though I’m really looking forward to reading more from those who have entered.

As for how Spark is going every time, I add some more to the book or the world it is both a thrill and ever increasing source of anxiety.  I can’t wait for you all to step into this world and I hope you love it as much as I do. The more I build upon the world, the more excited I get as there are so many stories, characters and places and their histories that i want to share with you all. I’m not sure how much of this you’ll see in this book but I hope you’ll at least be able to tell how alive this world is and that it immerses you right in like it has done to me. Afterall...it’s all going in my notes...and who’s to say we cant revisit Vesceria in more books ;).

For now, though my focus is on this book and this story and making it the best that I can. Which means I’ve got a lot of writing to do haha! Have a good summer everyone! :)