And then there comes the day. The day when the sun shines and you see something beautiful.

Here it is. The official front cover of Asteroid Made of Dragons. The entire team at Inkshares and Girl Friday Production and our designer David Drummond really knocked it out of the park. Tom and Veronica from Sword & Laser were also instrumental in guiding the style of this and I can't thank them enough. If it weren't for all these skilled, talented, kind people - the cover would have probably come out looking something more like this:

How do I feel?

Proud and terrified. This cover is marketable and slick and makes me feel very, very grown up. Also it kind of looks like a Beholder.

I wanted you guys to be the first to see - as you're the ones that made it happen. I'll do an 'official' reveal on my site in the next day or so, but for now GAZE DEEPLY INTO THE ABYSS.

Hello, milestone. It's me, Derek. I assume that you heard I would be arriving, all fancied up and surfing a handstand along my word wave! Whooshy whooshy. Splashy splashy. And for no apparent reason...honk.

What's that, milestone? Oh, yes, I WILL sit down to your table and have a big old steak of self-satisfaction...raw and ragged, to appropriately symbolize the journey thus far. It might not seem like a lot to some, but to me, 75,000 words of anything is a whole heap of...well...something. Hell, I could just type the word “story” 75,000 times, and although that wouldn't exactly added up to anything of what you might call “narrative value”, the sheer deluge of words alone should be impressive, dammit.

I have two time-lines that I'm dealing with...one in the distant past, and one in the distant future. It's been a challenge to figure out exactly how to present them, whether it be concurrently or separately. I think I've settled on separately, although I realize at a risk of interrupting the flow. I'm not a huge fan of that, but I think it would be less confusing, overall. Also, that way, I get to divide the novel into three “books”, or “acts”, and include cool, meaningful pages that announce each one, like “BOOK ONE: THE BOOKENING” or “BOOK TWO: THE THUNDER BOOK”.

As an aside, "The Thunder Book" is now officially a project in my idea list. You saw it here first. You can't have it. IT'S MINE.

That's about 300 pages, you guys. 100 or so to go.

Baaaaack...to work.

Uhhh...spoilers, I guess?

I'm poking and prodding the Inkshares site with new text and layout - please give it a look and let me know what you think! Same goes for my personal site - Spell-sword.com. I'm hoping to be able to show you the fancy-schmancy new cover in the next few days - and with that will come new people curious about the book. This goes along with my Pan-Social Platform Clean-Up Regimen -- time to hide all that moogle fanfiction, I suppose. Please let me know what you think will help other people get interested in AMOD - as I finish up the copy edits in the next few weeks, I need to refocus my attention to the Marketing Cannon. Oh, how it gleams...

I haven't said this explicitly in a while - but thank you. This has been an exciting week - in between stresses of Dev Edits and the oncoming Copy Edits - working on the final cover, starting to lay down early work on the marketing strategy - I feel like a BIG BOY WRITER. And it's all thanks to you.  So thanks, you weirdos.