Happy Holidays, You Animals! 

Just yesterday, "The Animal in Man" reached 200 inkshares readers. That's amazing! I can't say thank you enough! I also can't think of a time in my life when my fingers have had to hit the exclamation mark so many times!!! Seriously!!!

Enjoy this video of myself and my lovely assistant pulling the next five lucky winners in the second 100-reader raffle! Agh, there's another exclamation!

(Did you know you can read The Animal in Man's prologue and second chapter right now by visiting my writing portfolio website? If you have the time, find out what happens to Maxan when he wakes up.)

Goodbye for now, friends!

Machiners!

We have entered Winter, officially speaking, but the weather is hardly frightful and our spirits are so delightful. What a day! 

First and foremost, my congratulations to Tony Valdez on reaching 250 pre-orders for his comedic SciFi romp Dax Harrison!  Meaning books will be on the way! This is really well deserved. Great concept, awesome writing, hard work - check all the boxes. Also, amazing to see how the Inkshares community really banded together to push a colleague toward the finish line. Love it. 

OnThe Last Machine front the beat goes on and such a groovy beat it is. 

The Review-a-Thon this past Saturday was fantastic. Thanks to A.C. Weston for coordinating which undoubtedly took much time and effort. It yielded some amazing reviews for the novella, which I am very thankful for. Some of them I have been able to reciprocate already. Others I haven't gotten to yet. But I will. I promise. Thanks to Michael Valdez, AR Patterson, Jason Pomerance, Dave Barrett, and Byron Gillan for their wonderful words. It really does mean a great deal.

We've now surpassed 80 readers!! Thank you to all the new followers and supporters. Because we hit 75, I've conducted a clandestine raffle of unknown scope and substance....

And the winners are Melissa Berg and Peter Birdsall. You have each won a signed copy of Alter Ego No. 91 from January 2010. It's a super cool magazine and has an epic interview covering basically every topic possible with my friend and The Last Machine artist Jack Katz. Here are a couple of images for you:

We're at 81 readers so we might as well shoot for 100. Yeah, why not? Maybe we can do that by Sunday? Let's try. More cool stuff to come if we make it.

Thanks for the graphic, Vincent!

It's official, gang! We are OVER THE LINE!

Dax WILL be published. I can't thank you all enough. The show's not over and there's still a TON of work to do, but for now, I'm over the moon.

Now, a couple updates. First, fantasy author C. Brennecke invited me to do an interview for her blog, Myths, Mists & Musings! She had some great questions about the book, and naturally, I rambled on far too long. Haha. There's also a new exclusive excerpt from Dax to read! Check it all out HERE.

Also, be sure to check out Seven Shards: The Colors of Wine. There's about a month to go and plenty of orders to fill. Let's pay it forward and get another great book published!

And finally, a new special video update! I was planning to release it as a "4 days left" video. I guess it's now a victory video. ENJOY!

-Tony

Season’s Greetings!

There might not be any snow on the ground (at least not for most of us), but the final days of December are, in fact, here. As of today, Seven Shards has exactly ONE month to finish funding. I’m pretty confident that we’ll make it. So confident, in fact, that I’m not even going to ask for your help.

...Aw, who am I kidding? I could always use some help! If you haven’t ordered a copy yet, please do! And if you haven’t given the book a shoutout on your favorite social platform yet, well now would be a great time to do so, please and thank you!

(Or if you’ve done both of these things already, please sit tight. I continue to be tremendously thankful and couldn’t possibly ask for anything more!)

So, onto updates! Let’s see…

This past Saturday was the Inkshares Review-a-Thon! Thanks to the enormous efforts of powerhouse A.C. Weston (author of She Is the End ), the event was a great big success. Ginormous, even!

I’d like to give a shout-out to each of the wonderful people that left me a review on Saturday! Thank You to:

• Peter Birdsall, author of Feyside, a character-driven fantasy adventure that combines the wonder of steampunk with the magic of fairies.

• S.M. Hillman, author of The Faceless, a sci-fi tale of revenge, discovery, and difficult choices.

• Stephen Carignan, author of both The Sleeping Man (an immersive and imaginative fantasy) and Labels and Jellyspoons (a collection of poetry). Both are in the ‘Draft’ stage and well-worth following!

• Alan Tucker, author of The Devil You Know, an apocalyptic sci-fi with a heavy dose of humor.

• Andrew Wood, author of Storm of Fury, an epic fantasy with a truly unique antagonist.

• Thomas J. Arnold, author of Exile, Magus, a true epic fantasy full of adventure and exotic dangers!

• Jamison Stone, author of Rune of the Apprentice, and action-packed epic fantasy that is already attracting a huge following.

and

• Deborah L. Smith, a great family-friend-aunt and all around wonderful person!

Many, many, maaaaannnny kind words were said and I'm still buzzing from it. And blushing. Lots of blushing.

A new Author Interview is up on Myths Mists & Musings, featuring Tony Valdez. I, of course, recommend giving it a read. 

And to those that occasionally check my blog, you may have noticed that I never posted a NaNoWriMo: Week 4 entry. Fret not! This doesn’t mean that I bailed on NaNoWriMo, it simply means that I haven’t gotten around to blogging about it. In case it ends up on the back burner indefinitely, let me say now that words were written and it was good.

And as of yesterday, I finished all of my Christmas shopping! Whew!

That’s all for now. I wish you and yours a wonderful holiday full of family, friends, warmth, and at least a few hours spent curled up with a book!

Dear Friends

My editor Penny-Lane and I want to wish you all a Happy Holidays.

Thank you for your support, for your words of encouragement, and for making 2015 one of the best years of my life.

This year I did two big things: I ran the New York City Marathon, and I wrote a novel. It would be easy to pat my back and congratulate myself for such achievements, but the truth is that the blood, sweat and tears that took to achieve those two things were not only mine.

There were so many people cheering for me every time I reached a milestone; there were so many friends and family picking me up when I fell and thought I couldn’t keep going. There was all of you, who took a chance on my book and helped me reach my funding goal.

If I learned anything this year is that hard-work is not all it takes to achieve big dreams; a support system, a network of love is what make dreams come true.

So once again: Thank You All!

It wouldn’t be a proper end of the year update without a quote from the wisest man in the universe:

 “There’s a lot of things you need to get across this universe. Warp drive… wormhole refractors… You know the thing you need most of all? You need a hand to hold.”

The Tenth Doctor, Fear Her.