Hello everyone!
I apologize for the extended silence, but things have been busy lately. To update you on the progress of SoF, I am getting ready to receive the last feedback from my beta readers. My editor, Inkshares’ very own John Robin, is expected to finish mid-May.
After that I will do my final round of rewrites before submitting the manuscript to Inkshares for publication. Even after the manuscript is finished, it will still take several months for the book to be published. We’re still looking at late Fall for a publication date.
Thanks to everyone who had ordered thus far, and thank you for your continued patience.
Before I go, I’d like to give a shout out to Tabi Card and her book Scribbles. Check out what she has to offer below;
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You have 5 DAYS LEFT to get a free book! How is this so, you ask? Simple. If you order Tabi Card’s book Scribbles within a week, you will get: A FREE signed copy of Five Minutes (one of the Scribbles’ stories) The chance to win 1 of 4 art prints (those who order 3 or more copies of Scribbles will get automatically receive ALL 4 art prints) The chance to win the 2nd of 3 GRAND RAFFLES like the one below She can write and dream and work, but it is people like YOU, the readers, who make her writing and dreams and work worthwhile. Only YOU can make sure you will get a copy of her work in your hands (or on your e-reader/Kindle) and make her dreams of publication a reality. Watch this video for a look at what Scribbles is all about OR visit its project page. (Which also has sneak peeks at some of the stories . . .) & Order Scribbles here: https://www.inkshares.com/books/scribbles-a-collection-of-words
As always, thanks for your support!
-Andrew
Happy Friday, Space Crew!
Somehow, magically, I’ve finished the comic ahead of time. Happy early Free Comic Book Day!
Feel free to share the link among your amateur-comic-reading friends, and I hope you all get to enjoy a sunny weekend.
Your I’m-Really-Going-to-Relax-for-a-Minute-Tonight Space Captain,
-AC
Greetings friends,
Hi everyone,
This is a quick email to let you know some exciting news: the LA Review of Books is planning to run a piece on Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside later this month. I have no idea if the review will be positive, but until this point, it’s been very hard getting established media contacts to give me the time of day—let alone consider reviewing the book—so this is a HUGE breakthrough!
Back in December, Alec Ash, a correspondent for the LARB who started a writers’ colony in Beijing, mentioned UMDC while talking about expat writing in China on the Sinica Podcast. Unfortunately, he hadn’t read the book yet, but I was able to get his address and send him a copy while in Bali. Of course, that copy got lost in transit, but four days after he emailed me to let me know that it hadn’t arrived, the Bookworm (a large expat bookstore in Beijing) told me that they would be willing to stock it! One of my former students from Ningyuan agreed to stop by later that month to confirm that they had it:
Like I said, I have no idea if the review will be positive, but I’m hopeful, given this scathing, no-holds-barred takedown of Shanghai Cocktales that Mr. Ash wrote last year. He begins the review by saying:
"Somewhere outside the Fourth Ring Road, a nondescript borderline-alcoholic English teacher might be polishing off the manuscript of the China equivalent to The Sun Also Rises. Escape, reinvention, exoticism, disillusionment—it’s all there for the novelist or memoirist, plus baijiu, smog and as many happy endings as you can afford. There’s definitely a way to do it right, make it funny, and say something meaningful about how us foreigners (with nowhere else in particular to go) engage with China, or don’t."
That sure sounds like me, and that sure sounds like my book! Keep your eyes peeled. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but my fingers are officially crossed. Thank you again for all of your support. As I hope this update demonstrates, minor victories (mentioning the novel to the right person, getting it into the right store, leaving a review *cough, cough* that resonates with someone else) have the potential to lead to major developments.
Quincy
Dear friends and followers,
As of this writing, we are at 246 pre-orders. That means we are just 4 orders away from Quill! 4 orders from certainty! And 4 orders away from the beginning of the Chez Doris donation drive....
Getting to Quill means certainty of publication (unless I throw a hissy fit and decline the Quill package) so let’s have a look at some of the characters you’ll be meeting within these pages, starting with the club president, Oscar Mainwaring:
In other news, it turns out that there actually did exist a Veterans’ Club in London back in 1924, though it changed its name in 1936 to the Victory Services Club. Well, that’s lovely. I certainly don’t want anyone mistaking the club in this book for that real-life one, so it looks as though I might have to change its name ... which means I might also have to change the title of the book. Anyone have any ideas?
All right. Let’s get on to what’s what on the bookshelves this week.
1) "Seven Days Dead", by Christopher Johnson. Apparently, the focus will be on the interaction of different faiths and cultures in this particular zombie apocalypse, which I’m not sure I’ve seen done before. Also, the action takes place in the Middle East, and Johnson seems to be putting a bit of effort into verisimilitude with place names and geography.
2) "The Battle Within", by Alastair Luft. This one is an exploration of PTSD and its effects on one veteran soldier’s personal life, and if it’s filed as "thriller and suspense", it’s because dealing with life when you’re in that headspace is bound to be a rollercoaster ride of questionable reality. Also, it’s Canadian.
3) "Mission 51", by Ferd Crotte. The captain of a spacefaring craft crashlands on his destination planet ... from the excerpts I’ve seen, it looks like our hero is one of the Roswell aliens, and the destination planet is Earth. It’s an interesting setup, and I wonder where Crotte is going with it.
And that’s it for now. See you next week, folks, when we shall hopefully be discussing the joys of being on the qualified side of Quill.
Hiya Hexers!
I just finished writing a really touching scene, one I had been avoiding all week. Now that it’s done, I feel liberated and am ready to tackle the rest of chapter 7.
In the last couple of days we’ve had a half dozen orders, bringing our total up to 261. Thanks so much new backers! Onward to #DHM750!
As a quick reminder for any new backers, I’m making all the chapters of the first draft (uncut, unrevised, unedited) available to those who preorder the book. The trick of it is, I can’t spam you with emails without your consent, so if you want to read the book before it’s released, make sure to sign up for my email list here: http://eepurl.com/bw4Cvz
Okay, that’s it for now. I have some sewing to do. Have a great rest of your Sunday!
Love,
Amanda
Hey guys,
Over the weekend I was in Chicago for a wedding and had a chance to meet up with a few very righteous Inkshares author’s whose work i’ve been following very closely. It was a real honor to meet these guys and was really inspiring to find people facing a lot of the same publishing challenges Chris and I are but who are much further down the rabbit hole than we are. Somehow this entire process seems less daunting.
You guys are awesome! We need to do this again!
