NEW SHORT STORY: "Define Heroes: A Lore of the Reluctant Short Story"

FREE PROMOTION! - Starting tomorrow, April 29, this story will be free on Amazon for five days!

This will probably be my final story release until July-ish. By then, MY BATTERY IS LOW AND IT IS GETTING DARK will have released and I'll have one more short story ready to go.

"Define Heroes" is a standalone short story that's set in my LORE OF THE RELUCTANT series. Timeline-wise, it takes place after THE OUTCASTS OF VAMPIRE FLATS and BLADES IN ELSINGR.

Here's the synopsis:

Acys, Jasper, and Kalen are three friends from our world who woke up one day to find themselves in a fantastical realm of swords and sorcery. But it's been a few years... Now they're bored.

In this adventure, the trio of sellswords have run out of money in an eastern kingdom that is enjoying an era of lasting peace. In their bid to avoid skipping out on another bill, and to put a little extra money in their pockets besides, they might just commit regicide and plunge the entire kingdom into civil war.

More portal fantasy for ya!

This series has always been super easy to write. It was originally part of my goal to learn the ins and outs of self-publishing and so I thought up a concept that would be just plain fun to mess around with. I love the idea of fantasy adventurers who are in on all the jokes and are unimpressed with a lot of the tropes. And, also, they're kinda sociopaths at this point. Fun all around!

As I said above, I'll be running a free promotion starting tomorrow (April 29 @ 12 AM PST, as best as I can tell) and it'll run for about five days.

Be safe!

BLADES OF ELSINGR (Lore of the Reluctant #2) is Out Now! Also, an explanation...

Things moved quickly this week! The cover art was completed and I was able to get the second story in the Lore of the Reluctant series published this morning. Check out the link above for the Amazon Kindle version.

So, since this has been a long time coming, and I've gotten a couple stories published since the first book, let me explain what this series is and what it's attempting to be:

A little over three years ago, I set a goal for myself. I would self-publish at least three novels, regardless of subject/genre, in an attempt to 1) Learn the process of getting a novel to the market, 2) Build a kind of portfolio to show that I can continuously produce full-length projects, 3) Basically just keep myself writing and learn from whatever feedback I was able to get.

The result was the Lore of the Reluctant series, something I've been kicking around for years. Three friends from our world who wake up in a high fantasy realm, complete with everything they'd need to quest without incident. New bodies, new memories, and entire lives to draw upon so that they'd never miss a beat. By the time the series picks up, they've been at it for a while and they're getting kinda bored with the whole prospect. If they can't get back to Earth, they just want to settle down in a quiet city somewhere, but the Realm of Shiloft has other plans for them.

Each book is meant to be a light, standalone "day-in-the-life" story in the vein of the old Conan and Red Sonja novels. Almost nothing plot-wise carries over between novels expect for location and the trio's wanting to just quit the whole thing. My goal is to write at least three of these, keep them short enough so that they can be read casually, ensure the novels don't lean too heavily on each other, and hopefully make them funny as hell.

BLADES OF ELSINGR is the second entry, with one more being written as we speak. I have other projects in the air right now (that I've mentioned here before at one point or another). Work on it will probably progress in earnest over the winter break.

That's it! Please give the story a look if you can, post some feedback if you have the time. Otherwise, I'll see you next update!

Inching Towards Daylight

Thought I'd title the blog with a line from Matthew Stover, because I'd like to think it's apt. It's been a long year, filled with delays and ulterior obligations, but we're closing in on the final section for City of Blades.

Jubilations!

I'm really happy with the way it's been turning out. Even if you get an outline going, sometimes you can never tell where the story's gonna take you. The second and third acts are entirely different from how they were originally plotted out, and I'm hoping it's a little less predictable because of that. Even though the entire premise of the story is predicated on our three main characters going up against your standard fantasy tropes and reacting in odd ways, I still want it to have a few twists and turns!

But as to the goals that I set for myself before starting the sequel, I would like to provide a rundown in terms of what I think I've achieved so far, and what I still have left to do:

1. Create a Standalone Adventure: I've been working and reworking City of Blades so that if this is the first book in the Lore of the Reluctant series you happen to pick up, you won't be scratching your head and wondering, "Vampires?" I do want to give the impression that Acys, Jasper, and Kalen have been through the wringer, and that this certainly isn't their first adventure in Shiloft. Part of the reason I made Jasper a woman (who was previously a man before getting completely owned by that rogue necromancer) was to give an immediate cue to the reader that stuff has most definitely gone down.

There will be references to past adventures, scars from previous losses, but on the whole I don't believe City of Blades leans on any of those incidents to tell its own story. This was one of the major criticisms from The Outcasts of Vampire Flats, that readers had felt like they'd missed something. This is definitely something I want to correct to a point, and I hope I've succeeded.

2. Keep the Story Brief: As I've pointed out in other posts, I really feel like stories that try to be heavy on the funny work best when they stick around only for as long as they need to. Outcasts was around 47,000 words, which is probably as short as a novel can get and still be called a novel. City of Blades will be decently longer, maybe as much as 70,000 words depending on how I taper off the ending. And the increase in length directly correlates to...

3. Show More of Shiloft: Even when I was writing Outcasts, I had much of the Realm of Shiloft already plotted out in some form or another, but not a whole lot of it made it into the actual story. This was due to my commitment to making the story as streamlined as possible, and because I thought excessive worldbuilding would feel out of place in a novel that sported dick and tit jokes. But after looking at some of the feedback, I decided that I would draw a lot more of the world to the surface, and throwing our adventurers into the city of Elsingr seemed like just the way to do that.

It's certainly a far cry from Mythrin Forest, I'll say that!

4. Maps: I've been gradually working out a map of the North, the region of Shiloft in which these two novels have taken place, as well as a detailed-ish map of the city of Elsingr. I'm hoping to have them finalized concurrent with Book 2 itself, and I'll also be researching the obvious: how to incorporate them into the ebook itself.

5. Short Story: I mentioned before that I'd like to get some kind of novella or short story onto the Kindle Store that I can give away for free as a kind of entryway to the series. At this point, I do have something in the works that I'll be poking at gradually. As of now it's titled "None Shall Pass," and it will begin just after Jasper's resurrection in Endarin and follow the three as they make their way over the Backbone of the World.

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I think that's everything I wanted to cover! I'll be tinkering with the progress bar, since it doesn't properly reflect where the story's at. I was using 50k words as a goal, but I'm well past that now.

Oh! And I caught that I had somehow posted the same excerpt for City of Blades twice, so I'll be posting another one within the next week or so. Just gotta nail down the right part.

Later all!