Good morning Sleepyheads! (Need something better for that)

When looking at the graph of the ideal rate of funding versus the actual rate of funding, we are ahead of the curve, let’s keep it that way! In one week we have had 65 orders, which is so exciting it makes me overuse exclamation points! I am continuing to bother everyone I see about pre-ordering multiple copies and there’s been a lot of support.

Thank you to everyone who has ordered so far, a huge thank you to the people buying more than one copy: Leah, Jason, Joe, and Billy. I am going to work your names into the supplemental history of The Sleeping Man’s world in the form of historical quotes, characters, etc.

Let’s keep it up, and get this published. At the rate we’re going, it’s a matter of time.

Sweet Dreams,

Stephen 

I’m currently in the middle of a staycation here in the Orneck household. Movies, minimal cooking, discovering old restaurants made new...it’s heaven.  It’s been great to get my creative juices flowing, so I am sitting down to sneak some planning in for Chapter 8, the big set piece.  

I bought a book. Now what? 

This is the first update I’ve dispatched since These Are My Friends on Politics reached its full funding goal and became a real published book that a real publishing house is putting into real bookstores instead of the unprofitable ones I see in daydreams. So a thank you — to everyone who bought in, followed along, shared it with others and otherwise showed support for this little ray of light in this insatiable nightmare of an election year — is overdue. 

But it’s overdue for a reason, because rather than thank and leave you with a vague "you’ll get it someday!," I wanted to show my gratitude by letting you know exactly what’s happening with your support. (And I wanted to know what I was talking about before I started talking.) 

So here’s what’s happened. I sent in the manuscript and the initial cover design. Inkshares’ production partners at Girl Friday sent both back with some notes and some ideas about modestly bumping up the page count to hit the magic 64-page printing number (long story having to do with printers and multiples of four) and very possibly give the book the hardcover treatment (at no extra cost to you, of course) instead of the softcover treatment. (No promises yet on that, because I don’t know if it will happen, but it could happen.) I made a batch of new pages, lightly touched up a few existing pages, and handed in version 2. They sent back a few more notes, I did a last round of small touchups, and then I cropped and sized the pages so that they’re printer-perfect before handing in version 3.

And here’s what happens next. While the production wizards take those pages and assemble them into a sharp-looking book with all the interior and exterior necessities it needs, the marketing wizards at Inkshares are ramping up an extensive (word not used lightly — it’s extensive) plan to put the book inside national and independent bookstores and in front of media large and small that cover not just books, but politics and current events too. All of these wizards and plans are joining forces to coordinate a far-and-wide-reaching release in October, and if you’re a backer, you’ll have your signed and numbered copies of the book most likely a month before that October release date. (Again, that’s not ironclad, but based on what I’m told and on my own experiences as a backer of other authors’ books, backers getting their copies a month early seems to be the norm.)

So that’s the roadmap. It’s lengthy (even though it’s hyperloop-fast by book publishing standards — these things almost never happen inside of a year, never mind six months), but it’s that way because a lot of talented people are using really impressive resources to give this book the best possible chance it could ask for. When I said back in the campaigning stage that fully funding this thing is a (to borrow a phrase from the great Eddie Olczyk) tremendously tremendous deal, this is what I had in mind. So thank you for helping make that a reality.

5+2+1+1+6 = 15 

As is customary with these updates, I’ll close it out with the best thank you gift of all: some new pictures of Nina, who turned 15 on May 21 but whose face and table mannerisms remain indistinguishable from those of a puppy. Enjoy, and thank you again.  

Greetings Pirates!

Get your Babel fish ready because here’s an update on the manuscript, as well as my expected timeline! Hurray! Huzzah! Horatio! Horn blower?

As it stands, the book is mostly written. I say mostly, because it needs editing. First, my beta (a.k.a amazing-doing-it-during-their-spare-time) editors,  Mark and Tom, have sent me their edits which I’m incorporating.  I’m also rewriting some chapters to make them stronger, at least in my humble opinion. Those chapters will then be sent to my betas (they sound like groupies or aliens), who will then send me their edits.  It’s a process, as you imagine!

Once all of those edits are incorporated, the manuscript will be sent to Inkshares. My goal is August, but Inkshares is awesome and they’ve told me to take my time. However, I think I’m are in a good place and can make it so, as Picard would say. Famous last words?

Once its with Inkshares, their editors will have a crack at it, including a fact-checker from the Science and Entertainment Exchange. So cool!

So that is what I’m working on these days. I still can’t believe The Pirates of Montana won the Inkshares/Geek & Sundry Hard  Science Fiction contest. Its been a blurry week of self-congradulations alternating with the Pavlavian urge to check my stats in the contest.  

Excelsior everyone! Have a fantastic week! Here is your funny dinosaur meme!

Earlier this week, Geek & Sundry posted a very cool article about how Dungeons & Dragons was successfully being used in social therapy. In The Punch Escrow, I predict that games will replace therapy as we know it in the future.

Here’s an excerpt from the chapter Hiraeth:

In 1979 Edward Packard published the first commercially successful novel in what would become a very popular 20th century series of books called “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure.” In many ways this was a bridging of the worlds of interactive games and books (they didn’t have coms at the time, so they just wrote stuff down on paper), because the reader would play an active role in the narrative by choosing what the protagonist did next from a series of options. Rather delightfully, at least one option usually led to instant death.

"The Cave of Time" was the title of the first adventure published in that series. It was an imaginative story that took its readers on a journey through several real and fictional periods of time, from the end of the entire universe to the days of Camelot and the round table. The story’s mechanism for time travel was rather brilliantly not some fantastic device invented by a Vernian mad professor, but rather a series of tunnels that transported the reader through time, depending on which tunnel they chose.

Sometime in the early 22nd century, with the ubiquitousness of virtual reality and immersive gaming, a team comprised of cognitive neuroscientists and gaming technology experts created a psychoanalytical game based on The Cave Of Time. The virtual-reality game sought to help diagnose individuals with mental conditions, ideally with the aim of identifying such ailments before degeneration took effect. Using real-time analytics of eye movement, heart rate, neural activity, and facial expression, the games provided players with the opportunity to practice engaging in realistic social situations all in the context of a choose your own adventure scenario. The choices people made were helpful in establishing their mental state and whether they suffered from any psychological irregularities. The game itself eventually crossed over into the mainstream when modifications enabled players to edit content and endings. People would record their travels through the caves, personalizing outcomes. The caves became microcosms of their own universe and timelines.

After the Last War, many attempted to play out alternate strategies and endings to the war in The Cave of Time. Eventually it became common wisdom that the Last War would have taken place regardless of what was done in the immediate years preceding it, the prevailing common wisdom was that the clockwork which led to the war’s advent was put into action thousands of years ago. Still, to this day people still try to go back in time through the caves in search of answers.  

Hello, all you delightfull readers and writers. I am happy to announce that I am only days away from publishing To Kill a King. I am not going  to set an exact day, but I hope to be up and running on amazon this coming week. I am going to be sending out an exclusive short story in the next few days as well. If you want it (It’s free), sign up on my website here. I will also be drawing three names from my subscriber’s list, and those three lucky people will get a free signed copy of my book, so sign up now,  here is a good place sign up too.

Keep writing friends!

Yahoo...finally I discovered Random.Org to solve my raffle picking strategy!  This fine site generates random numbers between 1 and 100 which enabled me to remove the stress of trying to link my Grand Prize Draw to a UK lottery...which sadly only goes up to 60!  

So, after some embarrassingly early selections of family members!!! The winner at number 16 in the last hundred orders is...drum roll...Kyle James.  Contact me through DM or email me at touchwoodpicturesltd.com with a paypal address so I can speed $100 to your in tray.  

Meanwhile, the  first chapter of BRUGES BLOOD the follow up novel to LOUISIANA BLOOD is up for comment on INKSHARES.    Also anybody that has a few credits can grab Louisiana Blood HERE at a reduced price.  Happy weekend!