To all my patient supporters,

Two weeks ago I received the first round of developmental notes for AFTER DEATH from my editor Matt Harry. For the most part his notes made a lot of sense, and in discussing with him how best to address his concerns I have decided to restructure the novel.



By this I mean that I will take what is currently a three-part story, each part following one incarnation of the protagonist’s soul, and attempt to intercut the lives one chapter at a time. Our hope is that this will result in a draft that is not only tighter, but more surprising, suspenseful, and even more of a mind bender than the book already is.

This will take time, of course, and with every day that passes I am increasingly grateful for your continued patience and support.

In related news, Nerdist founder, comedian, and Talking Dead host Chris Hardwick recently plugged AFTER DEATH on his ID10T podcast! It was incredibly kind of him to do that, and I can’t thank him enough. Click below to check it out!



Not only that, but AFTER DEATH recently received this amazing blurb from J. David Pleins, Ph.D., a writer and teacher whose work has been a huge influence on my own:

"Daniel Lee’s captivating After Death weaves together time travel, zombie apocalypse, epic battles, zen musings, quantum physics, and timeless archetypes. He plays with an array of afterlife concepts — beliefs of different faiths, tales from different mythologies, icons of pop culture — and forges them into a Grand Unified Theory of the afterlife. It’s both a raucous adventure story and a deep-dive into the human soul. If the great mythographer Joseph Campbell wrote a novel, this would be it!"

— J. David Pleins, Ph.D., author of The Evolving God and Professor of Biblical History, Mythology, Science and Religion at Santa Clara University

Who could ask for a better blurb than that?

Finally, if you’re at all a fan of tabletop games, you probably know that the Kickstarter campaign for Restoration Games’ new reimagining of the classic 1980s board game Fireball Island has been, well, on FIRE. They surpassed their goal within the first hour and have gone on to raise well over $2 million! 

The team at Restoration Games, aware of my obsession with the game and that I moderate the /r/fireballisland subreddit, asked me if I’d help promote the campaign by teaming up with The Brothers Murph, the former Dice Tower YouTubers with whom they have a sponsorship agreement, and letting them film one of my infamous Fireball Island Night parties.

They agreed to my terms (a free copy of the game and that I got to plug my book in the video) and the end result is below. It was a ton of fun! Click the image to check it out!



On that note, work on my revisions continues.

I’ve already learned a ton from this experience and made many new friends in the Inkshares community of authors. I’d like to give particular shouts out to my fellow Sci-Fi Contest cohorts Katherine Forrister and Ferd Crôtte, whose books Curio Citizen and Mission 51 won the Nerdist contest alongside me. Of the two I’ve so far only read Curio Citizen, and it is excellent. I highly recommend ordering a copy for yourself.

Thank you again for sticking by me through this process, and for continuing to spread the word and share the link to my book with friends. It seriously means the world to me.

If you don’t already, please follow me on Twitter @dannyboylee.

And until next time, be excellent to each other!

Friends, we have an update!

Two days ago, I received my editor’s notes for my second draft of Tantalus Depths. He was impressed! The story is making serious progress toward genuine greatness. He said it will likely only take one more round of development edits before it’s ready to go to the copy-editing stage.

The last round of development edits I made took way too long. It took me months to get things just the way I felt they needed to be, and by the end of it I kind of just wanted to swan dive into a woodchipper. Fortunately, though, this next round of development edits won’t take long at all. I’ve gone through all of Matt’s notes a couple times now. There are way fewer of them than last time, and most of them are very simple fixes. With this last draft I had to fully rewrite four or five chapters from the ground up and ended up adding about 20k words to the manuscript as a whole. This next round of edits should be little more than tweaking sentences here and there, trimming a few out or adding a few in. I anticipate no significant multi-page rewrites for this one, so it should go a whole lot faster.

In fact *knocks on wood with all the might of Mjolnir* my goal is to finish this round of edits by the end of this week. I’m hesitant to put definitive timers on things these days, since every single step of this editing process has taken me WAY longer to do than I thought it would, but now that I have a better handle on how long it takes me to do this kind of work and knowing that the overall workload for this draft is way lighter than the last, I think one week is quite attainable.

Of course, there’s another reason to try and get this done that fast. As most all of you should know by now, I’m still trying to get Proteus funded. We’ve made slow but steady progress with that campaign, and as of right now it’s hovering at just a bit over 340 orders. We’ve almost reached the halfway mark with two more months to fund it.

Tantalus Depths comes first, though. That’s the book I started first, that’s the book that the most people have supported, and it’s the book people have already waited altogether too long for. So I’m taking a break from campaigning Proteus until I finish this draft of Tantalus Depths and send it in. Obviously I don’t want to lose more campaign time than necessary for Proteus, so hopefully that deadline helps keep me focused on getting this draft done quickly.

It’s going to be a busy week! I’m honestly looking forward to working on this draft, since I’ve already got some interesting new ideas to implement. I’ll send another update as soon as I’ve finished this draft and sent it in, so hopefully you’ll hear from me again really soon!

By the way…since I’m not going to be actively campaigning Proteus much this week, I’d be extra-extra grateful if a few more of you could support that book by giving it a pre-order or two while I edit Tantalus Depths. We can double our productivity that way and I’ll be at least a little less stressed out!

But not that much less stressed out. My body consumes stress for nourishment at this point.

Dear friends and followers,

It has been a rather intense two months. February and March were both spent going over the book with a fine-toothed comb and rewriting significant parts of it. Streamlining. After spending two months doing absolutely nothing except This Book, it feels more than a little strange to suddenly not be working on it. The pretty-much-final document was sent in to design last week, and now it’s out of my hands.

For now, Inkshares is sending it around to various people and places to get blurbs and reviews--I wouldn’t know where to begin, personally. I’ve heard that some really nice things have been said, and it’s all very exciting.

For you, though, you’re probably wondering when you’re going to finally get your hands on the finished product. Near as I can tell, we’re looking at an official publication date of 31 July 2018. Now that all the vagaries of writing and editing are over, I doubt if there’ll be anything to change the date again.

The question now is, who should I kill next?

Well, backers, it’s out in the world.

I’ve just started receiving notifications that the first copies of Blue Water are being received. I’m not quite sure the timeline on eBooks yet. I’ll contact Inkshares and have an answer for you shortly.

I am so excited/terrified right now in the best possible way. I know this book is the culmination of not only my work but of everyone along the way who ordered one and told a friend. I hope you enjoy it.

 And if you do, please tell your friends again. We don’t get the full brunt of a massive advertising campaign to get this book noticed. It’s just us and the word of mouth. I know some people were nervous during the crowdfunding stage to purchase a book by an unknown author from an unknown website without the promise that it would ever get published you’d get your money back. So now, thanks to the people who believed in this book enough to still throw in some cash, we can take care of all those issues. Except for the unknown author part. Blue Water is a finished novel, people are reading it currently, and it’s available for pre-order from Amazon, a more well-known retailer (no offense to Inkshares, who I still encourage you to purchase the book through.)  So share that info with anyone who was on the fence, especially if you really like it. 

 Thank you all again for paving this road. I wouldn’t be here without literally every one of you. 

Joseph

4/17/18

Hello, everyone.

I’d wish you all a happy spring, but so far, spring seems reluctant to truly show up around here. Hopefully that will change soon!

In the meantime,  I wanted to share a quick update on Shadow King...

There are now only two books ahead of Shadow King in the queue (at my last update, I think that number was seven), so things are moving along. 

I’m HOPING this means a summer kick off for my project, which will get Shadow King into the hands of the Inkshares editor for the line-edit portion of development. Once we have an official kick-off, I should be able to get a better approximation of when my release date will be--and I’ll be sure to let you all know as soon as I know!

I’m very excited that we’re a few steps closer to official production! Thank you again for sticking with me through this excellent adventure. Looking forward to updating you with more news soon. 

Best,
Susan

HALFWAY THERE! Thanks to all of you, we’re halfway to publishing Trigor, the followup to Pilot X. Man this has been nerve-wracking. But thanks to your support I’m still a believer that enough people liked the first book to want to find out a little more about the adventures of Pilot X and Verity! 

So if you feel it’s right, spread the word! The faster we get to 750 orders the faster we can get to work editing, designing the cover, getting the audiobook into production, etc. 

 As a thanks to y’all here’s a little snippet of the part I’m working on editing today. I promise it’s out of context enough that it won’t spoil anything. Unless you’re very concerned about the fate of pineapple. 

 EXCERPT: Kayla glared at her then took another bite. “So, you do have a pineapple. You didn’t lie about that.” “He’s not lying about anything,” said Glonda. “I figure he brought you here to show that we trust him and you can too. To be honest we just met him so what do we know? But he’s meant everything he said, and he hasn’t lied.” 

 THANK YOU 

 On to 750!

Almost halfway!  THANK YOU!

So we’re progressing along on Trigor. I knew this would move a little slower than Pilot X because sequel, but it’s progressing nicely. I also remember that even with Pilot X we had a bit of a mid-way slowdown. It’s something psychological. People love being in at the end to help push something across the finish line. 

So I need your help getting that momentum back and rolling past the midway point. If you could, sometime today just mention Trigor and the Inkshares campaign. If you’re feeling really generous, tweet it or post it on Facebook or sing it on Musical.ly or whatever it is you kids do these days. Any passing of the word is truly appreciated!

AND let me know what else I can do for you in return? Another sample chapter? A recipe for pie? A song? You name it!

Thanks again SO much for believing in good ol’ Pilot X.

Tom

Update!
Just a short one today, but a worthy one.

Proteus has finally passed 300 preorders! We officially have more pre-orders than the Somnambule has crew members (conscious ones anyway. We still need to sell about 49,700 copies to match the number of colonists in stasis. We’ll get there). This is solid progress! We’re slowly crawling up on the halfway mark, and I’m hoping to reach it within the next two weeks. We’re slightly behind schedule, but not by very much, and progress has still been pretty steady overall.

I’ve mentioned it before, but the stretch between 250 and 500 pre-orders is a vast, empty wasteland for a pre-order campaign. We’re right in the middle, so we don’t get to feel the surge of excitement that accompanies the first couple weeks of a campaign’s launch or the similar surge as we see the finish line approaching. Right now, nothing seems to make an impact. But I assure you, it does.

Please keep showing your support by liking and sharing Proteus on all your social media. Tell all your family and friends about this book, online and in person. I know I say that every time, but I can never overstress how important it is to spread the word. If you haven’t yet pre-ordered a copy, or if you think you’d be willing to order a second or third one to support the project, I implore you to do so. Proteus only becomes a book with your help. I’m just the writer here; you’re the ones who can turn it from a concept in the notes on my computer to a printed book on shelves worldwide and in your own hands.

Thank you as always for your support, it means more to me than I’ll ever be able to express. I cannot wait to share this book with all of you.