This year, the holidays come early, because I have a gift for you. Starting midnight Pacific Time on December 19, which would be approx. 16 hours from now, The Betrayed, my first book in The Lost Words epic fantasy saga, will be free for download for three days. In order words, you get a free e-copy of my book.
Dear readers, as you most vividly recall, several months ago, I participated in a writing contest called The End – a short story apocalyptic anthology featuring speculative fiction written by the SFFWorld.com forum members. As you even more vividly remember, I was voted among the winners. And now the book compiling the stories is out, just a few days before the world officially ends, so you’d better hurry and grab yourself a copy. Best thing? It’s free.
Holy barnacle! I have finished the third book in the series. It will be a while before you see in the stores, but the entire text is there. Exactly 105 days after starting the second book, I have completed the third one, with 240,000 words written, averaging more than 2,000 words a day, although most of the writing was done on weekends. Moreover, I have successfully beaten my usual autumn-winter writers’ block, as there’s none, and I have never been more pumped about writing.
Yup, I just got interviewed again! Anyhow, a nice fellow by the name of James, A.K.A. Cirias, who runs the fantasy slash speculative fiction blog fantasybastion.com, agreed to interview me, with the questions focusing on my book writing. If you’re interested, I recommend you hop by the yonder site and take a look at another facet of my lunacy. For those of you with the attention span of a newt, I kindly added this excerpt.
As someone suffering from a mild case of OCD, order and consistency play an important role in my writing. Things have to be meticulous, in every shape or form. However, when you are trying to write a book, sprawling over four hundred pages with some 50 chapters and perhaps 150K words, even the most obsessed author will begin to lose track.
If you like my writing, or perhaps if you do not like my writing but would like to see more examples that might change your mind, then you might want to wander over to Dedoimedo.com and grab a dozen short stories posted in the special Here be dragons subsection of the Life category. You will find a decent handful of prose there, and you just might like some of them.
Today, I want to talk you about the fictional world setting shown in The Betrayed, better known as the Realms. For those of you who may have read the book, the little map at the beginning of it probably raises more questions than answers them. So let us talk a little on what the map gives us, and perhaps also briefly touch on the topic of how maps ought to look in a fantasy book. P.S. Some spoilers may occur without prior notice, so watch it if you intend to read The Betrayed one day.
Here’s the thing. Some time ago, SFFWorld.com has organized and launched an on-going writing contest, called The End – a short story apocalyptic anthology featuring speculative fiction written by the site’s forum members. Stories, ranging in size from 2,000 to 5,000 words, are submitted via three contests on the Writing Forum of SFFWorld.com, revolving around Earth, Wind and Fire elements. Guess what, I participated in the recent Wind contest part, and I’m one of the three selected winners!
A short post, but full of excellence, so to speak. I have some good news to share with you, dear readers. The Betrayed was selected for a review and feature in the August 2012 edition of the Reviewer’s Bookwatch, by Midwest Book Review. Here’s the official quote.
Ladies and gents, some really good news! Last week, I have finally and fully completed writing the sequel to The Betrayed, which will become a second book in The Lost Words series, to remain unnamed at this point. Draft one was already complete last month, but then I set about reading and fixing little things, a touch here and there, polishing some of the sub-plots, adding an extra ounce of flesh and lore to make it more believable and interesting.