I am feeling dizzy with gratitude! This was truly a special night. Mission 51 reached a funding milestone in a truly heartwarming way. I simply asked on Facebook, and friends responded. We now sit a 100 pre-orders! I am overjoyed!

Thank you Marie Nall for helping us get there, and Sally Johnson Reed for your friendship and support! You are the greatest! :-)

And a very special thank you to Michael Haase and wife Margie, who took time off from new baby duties, to dial the pre-orders up to 100! Thank you!! :-)

Michael, as you all must know, is the author of The Madness of Mr. Butler, winner of the Nerdist Space Opera Contest (in production), and of An Adventure With Dada which is currently in funding. Please give them both a look and send some love his way! :-)

In my Sunday update I alluded to something in the works involving me that I was really excited about, but I didn’t give specifics.  Well, now that the new Nerdist contest has begun and the unveil has happened I feel the time is right to tell you about it.

I have a feeling more than a few of you have already seen this particular entry into the contest - Too Many Controllers: An Anthology.  Well, that was my news.  In case you haven’t checked it out yet, I am one of the 15 authors contributing a short story to the collection.  I’ve mentioned before that science fiction was one of my first loves, and a major reason I’m so excited about this collection is that I’m finally going to get a chance to show that love to you all.

That’s all I’m really going to say about the project here, since when you clicked that follow button you were doing so for Exile, Magus.  If you’re interested in keeping up to date with what the 15 of us are doing(myself, Andre Brun, Elayna Mae Darcy, J.F. Dubeau, Brian Guthrie, Paul Inman, Richard Heinz, Ricardo Henriquez, Christopher Huang, Tal M. Klein, Billy O’Keefe, Amanda Orneck, Elan Samuel, Matthew Isaac Sobin, and Jamison Stone), then go follow Too Many Controllers so you can stay up to date as we release more details of the stories contained within.

In case you’re worried that this may delay progress on a campaign relaunch for Exile, Magus, don’t be.  Magus is fully written and just really waiting on a proper developmental edit and publisher.  Currently I’m waiting on my work schedule to slow down enough to have time to properly promote it before I start another campaign.  I’ll have more on that topic when that time is closer, though.

For now I’ll just thank you all for your time, and hope you enjoy yourselves and your reading!

All, thank you for your support so far. 

The universe (or something–maybe subconscious resistance) seems to be conspiring against me posting the chapters I already have of the novel every day, as I planned to. A great-aunt of mine, whom I loved dearly, passed away at the end of May, and I’ve been struggling with the loss of an entire generation in my family. I have a deep and abiding respect for my elders, and I feel utterly lost without their grounding force in my life.

I attended Great-Aunt Margaret Ruth’s funeral yesterday, and the loss I feel is incredible. She was one of the most faithful, kind, and classy women I’ve ever been blessed to know. She and her generation, including my grandparents, have been such an important feature in my life, and I don’t know what to do with myself now that they’re all gone.

The other reason that I’ve been unable to post until today is that I’ve been a very busy pet parent. My puppy, Doc Holliday, was attacked Friday night after escaping from our yard, and he had to have emergency surgery that night. I’ve been busy caring for him since then, as he has 30+ stitches in his right front leg. Being a mom is hard sometimes, even when your babies are all fur-babies.

Anyway, I’m back, and I have several updates for you.

1. My interview on The Hangin’ With Show will take place this Thursday (June 2). I will let you know when it is posted.

2. I may be interviewed by Local 15 News in my hometown of Bay Minette, Alabama about my Inkshares campaign. This is not a sure thing yet, but fingers crossed!

3. I’m making several editorial changes to Frost, and I believe they’re going to make it a much stronger story. You won’t see these changes until I’ve uploaded everything, including the final chapters of the story, which I’m writing right now. I will be finished with my initial draft of Frost by the time this Inkshares campaign ends. The changes include changes in location to all real places I’ve personally visited. Cypres Cove, Florida, will become Bay Minette, Alabama. Rosehaven Downs, England, will become Chicopee, Massachusetts. I believe this will lend more realism to the Earthly locations in the novel, and provide even greater contrast to Daraglathia. There are other changes I can’t share yet because they would mean sharing some spoilers, and I’d rather you discover them organically, as you read.

That’s all for now, but I’ll share more soon!

Trekonomics on NPR’s Marketplace tomorrow

Dear all,

This morning I taped an interview at Marketplace studios in Downtown LA. The segment will air tomorrow. Since all of you are distributed across time zones, I recommend listening online (if you are so inclined). 

The segment will air tomorrow. It will be posted here:

http://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-tech

Enjoy!

Live long, and prosper.

Manu

Hello friends,

Remember last update? Sure you do! I talked about a bunch of stuff. Asked you to review The Life Engineered on Amazon. Discussed the future of A God in the Shed. We had a blast! Do you remember me talking about the latest Nerdist contest and how I wasn’t going to participate but had something special I might be doing instead? Well, here we are...

Probably the best thing to have come out of the whole Inkshares experience is the community of writers that I now have the privilege of hanging out with. These are driven and creative individuals who love nothing better than to tell stories, so when the theme was announced, video games, many couldn’t resist. 

So while not directly participating in the contest, it’s my honour to announce that I will be contributing to ’Too Many Controllers’, an anthology written by fifteen Inkshares authors who love video games. Each of us is passionate about video games in our own way and are bringing a story under that umbrella to the table. 

I’ve read some of the synopsis and they look amazing. To be honest, I came very close to declining the invitation because I couldn’t really come up with an idea that lived up to what was already on offer, but then... it hit me. Something that’s very much in the same voice as everything else I tend to write and I’m getting extremely excited for it. Go check it out. This thing is going to be a blast. 

Cheers, 

JF