We are so close to the publication date! Soon the book will be in your hands! FINALLY! This is super exciting and I cannot wait for you to get it. This brings me to an important part of this process...

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I cannot thank you all enough for sticking around on this journey with me. It has been a whirlwind, dramatic, emotional, and crazy ride. Thank you for your patience, your encouragement, and your faith in me. I literally could not have done any of this without you all. 

To my incredibly patient followers and readers,

Let me begin by thanking you profusely. Thank you for your continued support and interest, for messaging me, stopping me in the office, or spotting me randomly in a store and asking me when the Hell After Death is going to come out.

It makes me feel terrible for the long wait, but it also makes me feel good that so many people are excited to read this novel on which I’ve now spent ten years of my life.

I apologize for the delay. Much of that is simply out of my hands, as I’m merely one of many talented authors whose work is being developed and published by Inkshares, and each of them are as anxious and as deserving of attention as I. 

That said, my number has been called. And over several conversations with Inkshares CEO Adam Gomolin — over email, phone, text, and in person — a plan has been hatched to, yes, once again restructure the novel, this time sharpening its focus on the characters of Cara Lindley and her grandmother Meryem Nurzhan. 

The character of Icara Lightfeather and her entire storyline is going to be cut from the book. (Boy am I glad I didn’t pull the trigger on that tattoo of the compass from the map of Icara’s planet!)

Let’s please take a moment to admire the incredible work of artist Andy Gouveia, who created the map for me.

To those beta-readers who considered this aspect of the book their favorite part, I can say only that Icara and her world will most certainly one day see the light of day in some other shape or form (these things almost always eventually do), and that I have every intention of cannibalizing the crucial plot elements from her storyline in service of this more honed concept.

Meryem’s backstory will be expanded even further, going into deeper detail regarding the previous outbreak of the plague in Kazakhstan and her life in the years between then and her emergence as the world’s preeminent expert on the Fever. 

Some of the novel’s trippier aspects will survive, but will be made far less prominent, and the book will center more on how three generations of one family were affected by a disease, becoming less Cloud Atlas and more Sharp Objects, which — you know what? — is going to be pretty cool and a lot more accessible.

This will take time, of course. Adam’s hope is that further developmental editing will take eight months or so, with our eyes set on a potential July 2020 release date. Whether that comes to pass obviously depends on a number of factors, not the least of which is my own ability to pull it off. 

But I am eternally humbled and grateful to all of you who have stuck by me through this, and who continue to anticipate this novel’s eventual publication. It means so much more to me than you can possibly know, particularly at this moment in my life.

In the meantime, please consider picking up a copy of Writing Bloc’s ESCAPE! An Anthology. It’s packed with twenty gripping tales of escape, including my short story "The Grave Ordeal of Jawbone John South," about an 1885 bank robbery gone very wrong when an outlaw attempts to evade the authorities by ordering his gang to bury him alive with the stolen loot.

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If you are so inclined, you can also pick up a copy of my short story "The Equestrian," the slim tale of a jockey and his horse, and the night of horror that would bestow upon both an incredible ability and a terrible curse.

I’ve also gone and uploaded a bunch of my poetry, essays, and film criticism to my website, Dan-Lee.net, including my poem "Ode," which was previously published in the Santa Clara Review literary journal, "Incidents in a Traffic Jam," the piece that made me a California state finalist for the National Poetry Slam, and my critique of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which went unexpectedly viral a couple of years ago. 

If you have some free time, please do check that stuff out!

You are all so wonderful. And I can’t say enough how much I appreciate not only your support and patience, but that of the friends I’ve made through being part of the Inkshares community. I’ve never met a more supportive group of writers.

I’ll try to do a better job of updating more frequently, but if you don’t hear from me, please be assured that I am hunkered down, doing the work. And that one day in the not-too-distant future, you will find out what happens After Death.

Bonjour mes amis!

Today is a good day because I identified the thing.

Rewind to about a month ago, me following up on the delivery of MINE draft three, and a long discussion with the publisher. It was not the conversation I expected, and caused a true Come to Zeus moment. Also, a valuable learning experience once I’d recovered from the shock and worked through the 5 stages of grief. 

I believe it was valuable enough to share with you, my friends.

If you have a book in production with Inkshares, then you’re familiar with the Author Questionnaire. Check out number two below. It’s the question that needs to be answered to take the story to the next level (a.k.a. sell that shiz!).

2) What is the hook that will really grab your reader? Please pitch the book in one or two sentences. This ‘pitch’ should be as pithy and captivating as possible.

From the commercial perspective, I am an unknown author, aspiring to be a mid-lister, and not even regarded as an up-and-comer (to my knowledge) so the reality of creating a suspenseful thriller with snippets of beautiful prose in a compelling voice that has literary aspirations isn’t enough to sell the book. What I do have is thirty seconds and a paragraph on the back of the book cover.

That’s my takeaway.

So, I called a meeting with my dev editor. I said, no matter how much it costs, no matter what it takes, I want to get my hair cut into the shape of a dick head.

Kidding. Lighten up. Been there, done that. 

What I said was no matter the outcome here, publishing wise, let’s take this story to the next level. She said, aiiight, let’s do it. Then she gave me a new insight into a core theme of the book I hadn’t noticed, but knew in my heart she’d nailed it.

Another big but, though, is how to illuminate the thing into the next iteration of the manuscript?

I put it all aside, knowing I had to trust the process which involves a cult-like faith in the creative higher power that the solution exists in the giant playground where ideas run and jump and fall off the monkey bars, breaking their arms and chipping their teeth.

Give it the space it needs, and all shall be revealed. Just don’t eat the sandbox treats.

Last night I lay in bed, feeling a weight like swimming in an ice-cold lake with concrete mukluks. Then, I got up early because something was going on and not just because I had to use the bathroom.

My process involves capturing precocious ideas when they throw rocks at me unexpectedly. This morning I went through those notes, compiled them into a document and parsed them into a solution, if not the solution.

It involves a looping cycle like the worm Ouroboros, the book’s tail eating the beginning, and…BAM! There’s the manuscript, regurgitated on the pages. 

At some point this spring or early summer, I’ll let you all know if this works, being good at completion to a deadline (once upon a time a young princess told me I had two minutes, the end).

Here’s another takeaway.

Nurture that germ that’s going to infect the reader and spread the story like a contagion across the pages, so it grows, unchecked, into…the thing...