Category Archives: Books/Literature

Books/Literature

On Othello…

Found this absolutely fascinating article by Isaac Butler on Slate.com, exploring a concept that, I have to admit, I’ve had a curiosity about.  The question involves Shakespeare’s famous play Othello, and the question is:

Why is Othello Black?

I have to give considerable credit to Mr. Butler.  In a relatively short essay he addresses many of the questions I’ve had regarding the character and, even more importantly, why Shakespeare presented him in this way and for what reason.  There is history here and an awareness of what “black” meant to the author in the 1600’s versus what it means to us today.

The conclusions, specifically about what the play tells us about Othello the character (a noble soul driven to -and revealing- his base nature or a man ultimately betrayed by those far less noble -and beastly- than him?) as well as those around him and the questions that are never completely answered, are fascinating and had me appreciating all the more the play and its deep meanings.

A must read!

Books/Literature

On Writing…

A couple of weeks ago I read an article about the November Writing Challenge (you can sign up for it here, but 10 days have already passed!).  In essence, the challenge is to write an at least 50,000 word novel in the month.

No, I didn’t sign up for the challenge.  I’m knee deep in book #6 of the Corrosive Knights saga and the last thing I need to do is distract myself from it for a month writing another work.

When I read about the challenge, perhaps on io9.com or somewhere like it, I was fascinated by the commentary section and the various bits of advice people gave would-be authors accepting the challenge.  Though I wish I could find the actual comments, one in particular, which I’ll paraphrase below (sorry, don’t have the actual quote handy), struck me as interesting:

Leave things where they lie and write forward.  Do not go back and revise, rather write around what you originally put down.

In the context of writing a 50,000 novel in a month’s time, this is good advice.  Because of the nature of the challenge you don’t want to get stuck repeatedly going over sections of your book and/or rewriting great parts of it as the deadline looms large.

But as the advice presented is framed towards this particular writing challenge, its easy to point out it doesn’t relate to the type of novels I write.

Of course, I can’t speak about other authors.  If you are to accept what Stephen King wrote in his book On Writing, he claims to write exactly one draft of his novels, puts it away for a little while to “mellow out”, then goes over it one time before it is ready to be published.  Given the copious amounts of books he releases, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is indeed the case, that he writes along the lines of the advice presented above and then moves on to the next work.

As much as I wish I could write like that (oh, the number of books I’d have out there by now!), that’s not the way I do it.

I’ve posted bits and pieces of information on my writing here and there and I’ll likely do so again in the future.  For me, writing is not unlike creating an oil painting.

The painter starts with an idea of what it is they want to paint.  Perhaps it is a landscape or a city.  Perhaps a person or group of people.  You have some ideas of how things will fit together and you come up with a rough drawing.  Depending on how good you are, the drawing is done quickly or, more than likely, you work out spaces and where things lie on your canvas.

Your original idea(s) likely change during this stage, sometimes radically.  After a bit of work you reach a point where you have your drawing down on the canvas (if you do things that way) and you’re ready to lay down colors.  During this process of blending colors together you may have additional discoveries, either done on purpose or found by accident, which step by step further fill in your work. When you’re done, the picture you’ve created may well be very far from what you originally envisioned but if you’re successful, what you’ve completed is far, far better than that original concept.

So it is for me with writing a novel.  Usually I start out with a few rough ideas.  I may have a concept of a novel’s beginning and its end or maybe both and then have to come up with what lies between.  Rarely do I have ideas of things that happen somewhere in the middle of the book.

As for characters, I usually have an idea of the ones I want to use and their interactions, but this is often subject to change.

In the case of the Corrosive Knights novel I’m currently writing, I started out with an idea of the novel’s beginning, though this wasn’t set in stone, and its end, which was far better defined.

When I started writing the book and, unlike the advice presented above, I would very often go back over my work as I realized certain plot points worked better another way.  This is how I wound up with almost 30,000 words of material which I may wind up discarding completely.

A waste of time?  Most certainly, but the overall work is better for these unused experiments…if nothing else, they made me realize I needed to do better.

Returning to the characters, the original big bad villain of the piece, I realized, was better served being heroic (though not the novel’s hero).  Further, I added chunks of information originally conceived for the next book in the Corrosive Knights series but which I realized worked better in this one.  These chunks of information fill in historical blanks that finally give the series the 20,000 plus year history I was intent on telling.

Sometimes I wish I could transport back in time and with my latest novel in hand and present it to myself as I was beginning the work.  How would I react to being in the novel’s embryonic stage and then seeing it presented in full?  How would I react to the knowledge that the journey begun with a few small ideas would flower into something so full?

And after admiring the work done, I’d just have to tell myself who won the upcoming Super Bowl.

Might be worth a few more bucks! 😉

Books/Literature

Corrosive Knights 11/5/15 Update

Been a while since I posted an update on the latest Corrosive Knights novel, which will be #6 in the series and whose title I’m keeping to myself for a little bit longer.

Writing these books has been a blast even as they’ve also been a mighty struggle.  I’m working with a series I feel is unique in many ways.  To begin, the scope of the story is incredibly large, taking place over the course of some 20,000 plus years.  Readers are offered events in different epochs which, when put together, form a much larger story.

While there have been plenty of stories featuring flashbacks and flash-forwards, I think its safe to say no series -at least none that I’m aware of!- features entire novels that take place in sometimes vastly different times, past and the future, while (hopefully!) logically building up the larger tale.

The five Corrosive Knights books plus the one I’m currently working on have been/will be released -and ideally should be read- in this order:

Corrosive Knights

I say “ideally” but I’m not being entirely honest: The the first three books of the series, Mechanic, The Last Flight of the Argus, and Chameleon could be read in any order.  They feature unique characters and take place in vastly different times and therefore one could read them in any order they choose.

However, by the time you reach Nox, Ghost of the Argus, and the unnamed Book #6, the continuity established in these first three novels kicks in and, while I think the later books could be enjoyed on their own, I HIGHLY recommend you read books 1, 2, and 3 before venturing into the ones that follow.

Now, if I were to tell the Corrosive Knights story in chronological order, i.e. each book’s main story occurring “one after the other” (and ignoring whatever flashback elements are presented within said novels), the story order would go like this:

Small Covers in Chronological Order for Web2

That’s right: The book I’m currently working on, #6 of the Corrosive Knights series, actually takes place before the events of The Last Flight of the Argus and Ghost of the Argus.  In fact, they take place a few hundred years before those books!  Yet I would absolutely NOT recommend anyone read that book when it is released in a few short months (I’ll get to that in a second) before already reading the rest of the series and, in particular, The Last Flight of the Argus and Ghost of the Argus.

Why?

Because the events of those two books in particular fill in story concepts which have a big payoff in Book #6 and propels the reader into the Corrosive Knights series finale, which will be Book #7.

Fear not, thought.  There will be an epilogue to the series, a Book #8, which will wrap certain things up that weren’t/aren’t wrapped up in Book #7.  Book #8 will also offer what I hope is a great long view of the heroes we’ve followed for so long while focusing on one in particular.  To further screw with your head, I’m already finished with the first draft of Book #8 but only have a chapter or so written (along with a general idea of the story) of Book #7.

Not only is my series presented in a quirky temporal way, so too it would appear is my creative output!

Now, getting back to Book #6:

I’ve been working on that book for many months now and have a great opening half and a great conclusion but I spent a lot of time filling in what happens between.  I’ve written bits and pieces (amounting to some 30,000 words!) of material for that section but I knew it wasn’t quite coming together.

As I mentioned in previous blogs, writing for me is like a form of OCD.  You spend almost every waking hour at one moment or another thinking about your current work and going through the possibilities of what may/may not work.

Then, about two weeks ago, I awoke at 2 in the morning (not an unusual thing for me) and my mind was racing.  I was thinking about book #6 and that missing section and suddenly I had it.  One scene after the other flowed through my mind all the way to the very end.  Instead of going back to sleep, I headed to my desk and pulled out a yellow notepad and began writing what my fevered mind was giving me.

When I was done, I had five full pages of handwritten notes laid out detailing the second act of the novel leading up to the conclusion.  I was so damn excited yet also so damn exhausted that I stumbled back to bed and crashed.

In the morning, I was so happy I wrote down all my thoughts because while I had a general idea of what I was going to do, some of the details were lost in my near dream state.

On Halloween night, while my wife was occupied with giving kids treats, I had another burst of nervous energy and wrote most of the book’s conclusion.  Two days later, on November 2nd (this past Monday), I finished the whole thing and printed it out.  I still want to go over those 30,000 words of material I wrote and see if they’re at all usable in the novel but the fact of the matter is that the first full draft is finally done and I can now move on to the editing phase.

All my novels, when reaching this phase, feel different.  There have been books I’ve finished the first full draft that I know need a lot of work to be finalized.  That doesn’t feel like the case here.  I suspect I’ll need to go over this book a few times, at least three and possibly as many as six, but I have a feeling the editing process this time around won’t require as much work as with some other novels and therefore I feel (and hope!) this book will be ready to go perhaps as early as February.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

For those who have followed the Corrosive Knights series so far, I think you’ll find Book #6 another great addition to the series.

I’ll offer updates when the book is near ready!

Books/Literature

James Bond on my mind…

Between the upcoming release of Spectre, the latest James Bond film, to Daniel Craig’s ill-advised (though I’m sure from the heart, unless he was misquoted) comments regarding making more Bond films to getting all my Bond films -so far minus the Dalton ones, have to work on that!- on UV, it appears I’ve been wallowing in all things James Bond for the past couple of weeks.

And I will continue to do so here.

From Daniel Dockery and presented on the usually hilarious Cracked.com…

5 Ways James Bond Was WAY More Insane In The Books

I have the James Bond books but simply haven’t had the time to read them despite recommendations -and admonitions- from others.  Of course the novels movies are based on will often be different, sometimes radically so, from the movies made from them and James Bond is no different.

However, of the five differences mentioned the one that struck me the most was probably #4, the manner in which Dr. No dies in the novel.

DrNoFirst.jpg

Without giving it away, reading this makes me feel his death was so very…anti-climactic.  Silly even.  However, one has to remember the novel was originally published in March of 1958 and, let’s face it, that was an awful long time ago.  People people back then might have found some dark humor in the novelization death versus what I think about this villain’s death today.

Regardless, read the list, it is quite fascinating!

Books/Literature, Comic Books/Graphic Novels, General, Movies, Music

On Creation…

A couple of days ago in the blog post Crediting Bill Finger I stated Mr. Finger, while very much deserving of finally being acknowledged as a co-creator of Batman, isn’t the only one that should be credited.  I pointed out that Shadow author extraordinaire Walter B. Gibson also might deserve some credit as Mr. Finger and company, when they wrote the very first Batman story which appeared in Detective Comics #27 essentially made a comic book adaptation of one of Mr. Gibson’s Shadow stories.  While this was one (and the most obvious) of the Gibson written Shadow stories that clearly influenced Mr. Finger, I nonetheless feel I came off waaaay too glib in my posting and for that I apologize.

The fact is that while the very early Batman stories may have cribbed certain ideas (and even complete stories) from The Shadow works by Mr. Gibson, the Batman character and his world quickly moved off into other very fascinating and often unique directions.  While Mr. Gibson and some of his Shadow novels were an inspiration at the start of the Batman series, so too were other works and, again, Batman would go off into its own unique direction and for that Mr. Finger richly deserves the lion’s share of the credit for what he did.

I suppose the above should clue you in on the fact that I’m incredibly fascinated with artistic creation(s) and the credit deserved for them.

Perhaps one of the most interesting of the “creator” issues, to me, is that regarding author Alan Moore and arguably his most recognized creation, Watchmen.

Back in the 1980’s author Alan Moore became a superstar writer, and deservedly so, for his work on Marvel (later Miracle) Man, V for Vendetta, and Swamp Thing.  Watchmen would come at the tail end of his association with DC Comics in the form of the 12 issue limited series.  Watchmen explored the dark side of what the world would be like with Superheroes.  It was subsequently made into a film…

It was because of what followed after the release of this series that Mr. Moore had a major falling out with DC Comics and left the publisher never to return.  My understanding of the situation, based on interviews Mr. Moore gave after the fact, was when he and DC Comics came to an agreement about publishing Watchmen the contract specified that once the series was out of print, something which Mr. Moore expected to happen rather quickly, the rights of this series would revert to Mr. Moore and artist Dave Gibbons.  However, Watchmen proved an incredible success and DC has been able to keep reprinting it since its first publication in 1986.  I’ve read there were other issues which caused Mr. Moore’s ire as well regarding royalties, but I don’t know enough about them to comment.  Suffice to say Mr. Moore’s anger toward DC stemmed to a large degree over the fact that he lost control of Watchmen when he thought it would come to him soon after the initial publication.

When Mr. Moore left DC Comics in 1989 it was with considerable rancor and, as an author I could sympathize with his desire to control his own works.

But we’re talking about creative credits here and this is where certain facts rear their heads.

To begin, Mr. Moore originally conceived Watchmen as a story which would feature the various Charlton superheroes that DC Comics had at that time acquired.  Below is an image of those various Charlton Characters.  From upper left and moving clockwise you’ve got The Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, Nightshade, The Question, The Peacemaker, and Peter Cannon/Thunderbolt.

And here we have the principle cast of Watchmen.  From left and moving clockwise, you have Ozymandias (Peter Cannon), Silk Specter (Nightshade), Doctor Manhattan (Captain Atom), Nite Owl (The Blue Beetle), Rorschach (The Question), and The Comedian (Peacemaker).

Mr. Moore’s concept for a Charlton based Watchmen proved difficult for DC Comics to accept as the story was self-contained and ended in such a way it would be difficult to re-use the recently bought characters in any other way.

Therefore Mr. Moore modified the established Charlton characters into these “new” characters and the series was greenlighted and published.

Mr. Moore’s story, unquestionably, was “his” concept, a darker take on what would happen in the real world if Superheroes existed.  He had already begun that process with Marvel (Miracle) Man and Watchmen was the culmination of that theme (I’ll ignore the climax of the book and its too-striking resemblance to the Outer Limits episode The Architects of Fear because it is my suspicion this might have been nothing more than an innocent coincidence).

The facts tell us that while Mr. Moore is clearly the creator and writer of the Watchmen story, every one of the characters he used within them were thinly veiled versions of other authors/artists creations.  Which makes me wonder: Should the creators of the various Charlton heroes which were the basis of the Watchmen characters not be entitled to some kind of recognition -and perhaps even monetary compensation- for the characters they created and Mr. Moore essentially appropriated?

Further, because the project was initiated because DC Comics purchased the Charlton characters and those were the ones that provided the impetus to Mr. Moore’s story, don’t the people behind that purchase also deserve some credit for bringing these characters to Mr. Moore’s attention and use?

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that sometimes –sometimes– creative credit is a harder thing to assign than it at first seems.

 

Books/Literature, Comic Books/Graphic Novels

Crediting Bill Finger…

This fascinating bit of news appeared over the weekend:

DC Will Finally Credit Bill Finger As Co-Creator of Batman

For those who don’t know about this, since Batman’s first appearance way back in Detective Comics #27 released in 1939 and until today the “sole” creator of Batman has been listed as Bob Kane but most people who followed the character/creation knew that many, if not most, of Batman’s concepts were created by the series’ writer, Bill Finger.

To be fair, Bob Kane was the artist and person who thought up the idea of a “Bat-Man”.  But the concept he originally conceived of was radically changed to what we are more familiar with in the hands of the series’ writer, Mr. Finger.

Ty Templeton offered an amusing take on the Bob Kane Batman which gives you an idea where it went from his initial concept:

People have blasted the late Mr. Kane for taking credit for everything Batman related and snubbing all others.  It wasn’t until well after Mr. Finger died in 1974 that Mr. Kane finally copped to the fact that Mr. Finger should have been given a lot more credit for the creation/concepts behind the Batman character.

So, I’m happy to hear that Mr. Finger is getting credit where it is due…

…however…

I’m not trying to be a smart-ass here, but the character of Batman also owes a considerable debt to the works of Walter B. Gibson.  Mr. Gibson was an insanely proficient writer (it was said he could write up to 10,000 words a day) who wrote most of The Shadow pulp novels released from 1931 to 1949.

He was also the man who came up with many concepts which were subsequently cribbed (for those who don’t want to play nice, “stolen”) by Bill Finger and re-used in the Batman comics.  In fact, the very first Batman story, the one published in that 27th issue of Detective Comics mentioned above, was pretty much a scene for scene comic book adaptation of the Shadow story “Partners in Peril”, only with Batman sub-ing for The Shadow.

But don’t take my word for it.  Check it out for yourself:

http://www.shadowsanctum.com/pulps/shadow9.html

I believe the reprint book is still available for a reasonable price via Amazon.  Happy hunting!

Shadow9

Books/Literature, Computers/Electronics, Movies, TV, Video Games

The Overwhelming Era…

Keza MacDonald offers a fascinating article, posted on Kotaku.com, regarding his frustrations with so many really, really, REALLY big/multiple-hour-killer games being available seemingly all at once:

How Are We Supposed To Play All These Enormous Video Games?

I’ll go Mr. MacDonald one better: It’s not just video games.  We live in an era where we are being absolutely crushed by the amount of recreational material we have available to us.

I know, I know, first world problems.

Still, they’re there.  We have too many TV shows, too much music, too many books, too many DVDs/BluRays, too many (yes) video games, etc. etc. etc. screaming for every single second of our free time.

Used to be that the choices for entertainment weren’t all that many.  When I was young, there were something like five or so channels on TV and the major networks didn’t air all that many first run shows, at least compared to now.  You pretty much had to see these shows when they aired or, a little later, when they were rerun.

There was so little “new” programming available for all the hours of the day that it wasn’t unusual for the local networks to replay old TV shows on “down” times such as the weekends or early afternoons.

Thus it was that I’d discover shows cancelled long before I first saw them.  Shows like the original Star Trek.  The Wild, Wild, West.  Perry Mason.  The Twilight Zone.  The Outer Limits.

Cable came and grew and suddenly you had hundreds of channels and the need to fill the time with something.  So many new shows appeared that it became impossible to watch everything you were even mildly interested in.

A confession: I’m one of the very few people out there who hasn’t watched a single full episode of what is arguably the most popular show on TV today, Game of Thrones.  It’s not that I don’t want to, its just that I never got HBO and, when the episodes were finally available to me via video release, so much had been written/talked (and spoiled) about the various plot points that it was pointless -by that time- to try the show out.

But early on I was damn curious about it and even bought the first couple of books of the series.  These books sit unread on my bookshelf, given up for the same reasons I gave up on watching the show.  Granted, its my fault I was spoiled regarding the show’s plot.  I could have resisted checking out the various spoilers, yet having seen a few -even one!- there became no need for me to play catch up on the rest.

Getting back to Mr. MacDonald, I too have video games I’ve purchased fully intending to play them but getting sidetracked and eventually letting them go, sometimes without playing even a minute of them.

With whatever free time I have I’m nearing the completion of the latest Batman game (XBox One version) but waiting in the wings are The Witcher, Forza, and a few others I may never get to.  And that’s not counting the current Grand Theft Auto game I’ve got on my computer!

By now I think I’ve made my point: We live in an era of oversaturation and we have to be more and more picky about what it is we decide to spend our free time doing.

While it is a good thing we have so many options available for entertainment, I worry about all those things we might have missed while pursuing the new and shiny.  Used to be that certain works, with the passage of time, would be given second or third looks and, over the years, people would realize these sometimes forgotten works were special.

For example, the writings of H. P. Lovecraft.  Never successful in his time, his works were re-assessed over the years and became viewed long after Mr. Lovecraft’s death as truly great works of horror fiction.

Could that happen today and with so many works competing for our time out there?  Could anyone find the free time to re-assess an older work and realize they are holding something truly special in their hands?

For better or worse, I fear that is no longer the case.

Books/Literature

On being a successful writer…

Laura Miller for Slate offers the following interesting essay regarding British novelist Scarlett Thomas and the hard road to become a successful novelist:

Did Scarlett Thomas Miss Her Chance?  What Happens When Stars Don’t Align For A Gifted Novelist

I wrote a comment after this article, which I’ll reproduce here:

An interesting article, though I can’t help but wonder about the desire to hit it “big”.  With so many, many novels released in the course of a year (including my own!), if one manages to make an impression with even one of them you’re doing good, in my opinion.

Audience tastes are fickle and it isn’t too surprising that a person who hits it big with one novel sometimes doesn’t replicate that achievement with their next.  In music, this is an almost too common event (for those old enough, do you remember how popular Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album Jagged Little Pill was?  Her output since that point hasn’t exactly captured audiences as well as that album, to say the least).

As I said, at least the authors mentioned in this article managed to capture the audience’s attention at one point which is certainly better than many other authors have in the course of their career.

And don’t get me started on people like H. P. Lovecraft or Stieg Larsson or Robert Howard or Herman Melville or Joseph Conrad etc. etc. etc., authors who during their lifetimes achieved minimal success yet after they died their works were suddenly red hot.

Such are the vagaries of “good” fortune!

Books/Literature

Haze, the 2015 version

Many, many years ago (we’re talking the early 1990’s) I decided after years of writing short stories and scripts that I would finally take on the task of writing an honest-to-gosh novel.

My inspiration for this novel wound up being auto-biographical: At that time I was working at a Rehabilitation Center and caught a nasty cold that just wouldn’t go away.  It lingered for a very long time, more than two weeks, and after experiencing a weird (possible) hallucination while driving (I’ll get to that in a second), I decided to go see a Doctor.  I was checked up and told my system was in bad shape and that I was on the doorstep of having full blown pneumonia.  I was prescribed antibiotics and, after a few days, made a full recovery.

The weird (possible) hallucination I experienced occurred a few blocks from my house and on a main road.  I was driving up to an intersection and beside my car was a stopped public bus.  Its rear hood was open and the vehicle was going no-where.  In my very weakened/feverish state, the bus and its exposed motor looked like something out of a dystopian sci-fi film.  I did a double/triple take and stared at the thing and couldn’t help but wonder how alien the whole thing looked (hence the reason I say “possible” hallucination).

After I recovered, the bizarre image of that bus lingered in my mind as I considered writing that first novel.  I used the bus image as a springboard to think up a story of someone who, like me, becomes seriously ill and, subsequently, sees things that aren’t there.

In those early days of writing what eventually became the novel Haze, the process went along like many of the books I’ve written since.  I had to grasp for ideas and shift through ideas that worked and discard those that didn’t.  The story was originally conceived as more of a sci-fi work, but the concept of making it a murder mystery wound up being far more appealing.

One of the first things I wrote, a fictionalized version of the novel’s protagonist seeing a bizarre mechanical contraption on the side of the road, basically a written version of what I experienced and the very inspiration for my writing the novel, wound up having no place in the work when all was said and done.  Much to my regret, I had to cut that scene out.

In fact, that first novel taught me one incredibly valuable lesson regarding writing: Focus on telling the story you want to tell concisely.

Concisely (adjective): expressing or covering much in few words; brief in form but comprehensive in scope

The fact is that the early drafts of Haze spent waaaaaay too much time on the protagonist’s illness when the meat of the story, indeed the whole point of the story, occurs immediately afterwards.  At this late date I couldn’t tell you how many drafts I poured, sweat, and bled over before that realization hit me.  In those early drafts I was boring potential readers with stuff that wasn’t necessary to read.

So the book’s opening act was heavily trimmed and, regrettably, I realized the source of the story’s inspiration simply had to go.

I eventually published Haze in 2008 and focused on writing more and more books.  To this day I have 9 works out there: 7 novels, 1 graphic novel, and 1 book of short stories with more to come.

At this point in time I’ve built up a good head of steam with these new works and had no intention of going back to any of my previous books and revising them (Like many others, I too am uncomfortable with what, for example, George Lucas did with the original Star Wars films).

However, unlike Star Wars, Haze was, much to my bank account’s regret, never a wildly successful cultural phenomena.  It was a, in my opinion, cool novel that put a ghostly spin on the murder-mystery genre.  (There’s more to it than that and it remains perhaps the most autobiographical novel I’ve ever written even above and beyond the fact that it was inspired by a real life event, but that’s a story for another day)

Very recently, while working on the latest Corrosive Knights book, I reached a point where I needed to take a little bit of a break.  Writing novels can be creatively exhausting and I worried that with my latest work I might be hitting something of a rut.

Being something of a work-a-holic, however, meant that I had to fill my creative time with something else.  For whatever reason, I decided to give Haze a fresh look.  Enough time, I reasoned, had passed to the point where reading the work might be (almost) like coming at it for the very first time.

So I did just that and found that the story held up but that my writing skills had improved over the course of the seven years since releasing the book.  The only thing that really needed re-working, I found, was a early hallucination/nightmare the protagonist experienced.  As originally written, the whole thing read far more confusing than it should and needed a polish.

As for the rest of the book, what I wound up doing was cleaning up grammatical issues I missed before.  As I said, the story remained roughly the same but now, it was my hope, it would read like a novel I wrote today versus when I was starting out.

For those who previously ordered the Kindle version of the book, you can download the “new” 2015 version free of charge.  Not all that many people actually bought the paperback version, but it too will be available within the next few days (DO NOT buy the version available right now, its still the old one and is priced two dollars more than the new one will be).

Anyway, I hope you give the novel a look.  For those who think I’m all about the Corrosive Knights series, you may be surprised to find I do write other stuff as well! 😉

Books/Literature

Where I’m at…

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update on my actual, honest to gosh writing(s), so I’ll do so now:

1) I’m a good way into Corrosive Knights Book #6 (I’ll keep the title under wraps for now).  I really like the book though if you’ve read all five books to this point it might take you for a loop…hopefully in the most pleasant way.  I’ve got the first half of the book pretty much locked down but have work to do in the second half.  I’ve written what amounts to a rough version of that second half but there is still a lot of material to sort through and, likely, add to the whole thing.

2) I don’t know why, but it occurred to me that as into the Corrosive Knights book as I was, I longed to take a bit of a break from that universe -at least temporarily- and look back and revise/revisit Haze, the first novel I ever wrote.  I have done the revisiting part and was pleasantly surprised to find Haze’s plot and story still work out quite well.  Alas, my actually writing required some much needed clean up and revising which is what I’m doing right now.  I know the book has been available for a while (it was first made available through Amazon on September of 2008) and I know there are many who picked it up since that time, but luckily most did so through Kindle (ie, digital download) and very soon you’ll be able to download this new, much improved version of the novel without having to pay for it again.  This may happen as early as later this week (I’ll make the formal announcement then).

Haze is a book that is very much close to my heart, and not just because it was my first attempt to write a novel.  It touches upon many of the things that interested me back then and still interest me now, and the protagonist of the story carries more than a little of me within him (though I hope not the crazy part! 😉 ).

Anyway, stay tuned!