Hello friends and supporters! 

Tantalus Depths is now less than two weeks away from launch! The wait is finally almost over! 

If you backed the Tantalus Depths preorder campaign way back in 2016 and ordered a physical copy,  you should be getting an email today or sometime this week from inkshares asking for confirmation of your shipping info. Please, please, please make sure this info is accurate! Six years is a long time, and I know a lot of you have moved since then. The email will have a link for you to make corrections. If you run into any difficulties with this, please email Inkshares directly at hello@inkshares.com. Shipping is handled by my publisher, not me, so I won’t be able to do anything to help with this. 

If everything is correct in your shipping information, you’re good! You don’t have to do anything else, it’ll ship right to you around  the 27th. Preorders made through Amazon or another book retailer may come a couple days later than that, but they should be close. 

In other exciting news, the Tantalus Depths audiobook is now available for preorder! It’s exclusively available on Audible, and if you’ve never had an Audible account before, you can get your very first download free! Andi Arndt gives a truly phenomenal performance narrating this story; I truly could not have asked for a better reader. You’re in for a fantastic ride. Check it out here:

There will be more updates soon as we get closer and closer to the big day, so stay tuned! And again, PLEASE check your email, including your junk folder just in case, to make sure your shipping info is correct if you’ve preordered a paperback through Inkshares. 

COVER ART!!!

I’m just going to get right to it and then gush. Behold-

Any hair stylist will tell you that finishing is key. You can cut the best haircut of your whole life, but if you don’t style it well when you are done, bleh, game over. I think the same holds true with writing. And, let me tell you, Eudaimonia has been styled!

Tim Barber (of Dissect Designs) has captured the darkly feminine and unsettling tone perfectly. PERFECTLY. I can’t tell you how excited I was when I saw this. 

IT IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING I HAVE EVER SEEN.

More good news: Books have been printed! The audiobook is recorded! 
Finally, after much longer than I ever expected, The Man from Mittelwerk is on its way. The book will become available September 6 in time for the Bouchercon mystery & crime writer conference I’ll be attending in Minneapolis that week. (If you’re there, hit me up for a beer.)

The audiobook has been a lot of fun. We hired professional voice-over actor Jonathan Strait who handles the various accents and voices and really brought the story to life. He also found a number of typos, most of which (ahem) were corrected before the first print run. 

If you’ve moved since originally sponsoring on Inkshares, please be sure to login at www.inkshares.com, go to your Profile page, and click the Account button in the top right corner. Select Address from the dropdown menu, and verify or update the information. If you have any questions, please email hello@Inkshares.com.

Thank you again for all your support for this project. It was pretty fun to find a box of books on my porch and hold the finished work in my hands. Thank you to my co-author and brother Mike for making the book so much better than it would have been otherwise. And thank you to my wife for keeping the champagne on ice. 

In other news, I managed to run the Bayshore Half Marathon way back in May despite being injured and under-trained. I have since switched to cycling for the summer. How about you? Don’t hit reply, instead send email to ZUrlocker@hotmail.com. 
Cheers!
--Zack
PS. News updates will be provided at the author website https:www.mzurlocker.com.   

Dear Henderson House supporters,

As of this week, the Inkshares Team is reading my revised manuscript! I know it’s been a long wait since I resubmitted it at the end of January - trust me, I KNOW- but the good news is Henderson House is back in the active production cycle.

After this read-through, I will either receive another editorial letter and will need to make more developmental edits or the book will be ready to move to copy editing. 

Once the book moves to copy editing, I might get a launch date!! Since we are already into May, my guess is the book will not launch until some point in early 2023.

In other news, I met with fellow Inkshares’ Author Jacqui Castle today in Asheville, NC. I reached out to her since I’m in the area doing research in Cherokee, NC for Sequoyah Road the sequel to Henderson House. 

Jacqui was incredibly generous with her time and wisdom today. She has published two sci-fi novels with Inkshares, The Seclusion, and The Chasm. She was named the 2020 Indie Author of the year by the Indie Author Project. I really enjoyed the two-book series. Her books are available wherever you buy your books and someday, Henderson House will be too :) 

Thanks again for all your support. We’re getting closer to holding the book in our hands.

With gratitude,

Caren Simpson McVicker

Hello my friends. We’re overdue for an update, and there is some news. Unfortunately, this time it isn’t particularly good news, and I am not happy to have to deliver it, but I have a duty to keep you all informed about the ongoing state of things, good or bad. 

I received a call from my publisher earlier last week informing me that, due to ongoing problems with the global supply chain and manpower issues, it will not be possible for our printer to print enough copies of Tantalus Depths to get our first run ready in time for our May 10th launch date. There’s nothing I or my publisher can do about that; the printer simply cannot stock their inventory with the pulp, ink, and other physical materials necessary to create books in the needed quantity by that deadline. We’ve looked into other options, and there isn’t anything else we can do that will allow us to print on time without incurring a major cost deficit. As a result of this, we had no choice but to postpone our launch date for Tantalus Depths. 

I hate having to break that news to you all. You’ve waited so patiently for years, and the absolute last thing I wanted was to have to prolong that wait even further. Thankfully, it’s only by a few months. We’ve already locked in a new publication day for September 27th, so you can still be assured that you’ll get your books this year. Going from a summer release to a fall release is not the worst possible scenario, but I still hate having to ask even more patience of you. It IS coming, though. 

Frustrating as it is, this does give some advantages. I have a lot more time to plan and strategize my launch plan to make the publication day even more impactful. My publisher and I will take advantage of every extra day to seek promotional opportunities and build my audience to ensure this book lands in as many hands as possible. I’m doing my best to turn this situation to our advantage. 

The launch event at Kent Trumbull is being postponed as well, but I’ve been assured that we’ll still be able to do it on the new launch date. I’ll give more details on that when it comes closer. 

I’ll also be sure to use this summer as productively as possible for other projects. The new short story, Empire of Salt, is still on schedule for release later this month in the FAMILY anthology, and I’ve already begun work on another short story that should come out later this year or early next year. I may even be able to use this opportunity to get a head start on my next novel, Proteus, to make sure the wait between books is nowhere near as long as the wait for Tantalus Depths had to be. So there’s a lot to look forward to. 

Updates may be spotty and inconsistent for a while (as if they ever were that consistent) as I shift gears to plan for the new release window, but I won’t keep you in the dark about anything important that comes up. Everything’s a bit chaotic right now, but it won’t be for long. 

Anyway. If you’re starved for new story content right now, there are two new lore articles up on the website to check out: The Algorithmists and the Aftothysian Movement. 

The Algorithmists are a deadly cult of insane tech-worshipping terrorists determined to build an omnipotent AI, and the Aftothysians are an idealistic network of ecoterrorists devoted to stopping extraplanetary colonization at any cost. The two groups have only one thing in common: if either succeeds in their goals, human civilization as we know it will end. 

Learn more about these two dangerous subversive factions in the Explore section of evangraham.org, and see what happens when the two come into direct conflict with each other in my short story “Reliquary” in Writing Bloc’s Passageways anthology.