Don’t let the title fool you. That’s the title of the book I’m working on (in case you didn’t know that already). Writing the darn thing is turning into a challenge. I had one illness that destroyed a week of productivity. Then, I made up for half of that on one bank Holiday that I had not accounted for in my schedule (Juneteenth). My 4th of July plans got switched around, so now I have family coming all week this coming week (Monday through Friday). I had marked off the 4th and 5th as zero days. I wasn’t sure if I would be taking those days off for real or if they would be full-day writing days. Well, my plan to knock out 8 to 10k words each of those days went up in smoke, so they’ll be zero days along with Tuesday and Wednesday. I might be able to recover some time on Monday (my family doesn’t arrive until late that day).

Anyway, it’s not a tragedy in any way, shape, or form. I should be able to knock out about 6 to 8k worth of words today and maybe more tomorrow. I’m currently into Act III, so this is the grand finally of this book. I think the story is really good, but authors are the worst judge of their works. I’ll know for sure when my wife and I do the read-out-loud. She’ll give me a review of how good she thinks the book is. She really liked Nathanael. I have to admit that Nathanael was a fun book to write. The story has a lot of tension in it and plenty of mystery. That was the first book I’ve ever written from a deep first-person point of view. When I started writing Hopeless, I planned out who would be the POV character, and I chose the XO, Commander Evans, as the first-person character. I’m using the same deep POV in this book that I did in Nathanael, and it works rather well.

If you’re not familiar with the terms used to write books, a deep first-person is a book where every scene is from that person’s point of view and no others. If the reader needs to know information from outside that person’s experience, then something has to happen where that person has to be in the right place to find out the information. In the case of Nathanael, Sylvia was the POV person. She is close to Captain Alastor, so she acquires information from him at times. Other times, there is a battle raging, but she isn’t involved with it. So she hears the pilots talking over the overhead speakers when she’s in the right spaces, and if the reader doesn’t need to know the details, I just leave them out. It’s quite a bit different from third person, where I switch to the pilots themselves and show the details of the battle.

The last book will be the final battle, and I haven’t decided if I’m going to do a deep first-person for that one. I’ll probably switch back to third person and use first person for Alastor since he’s the primary protagonist in the story.

The Traveler Trilogy

I see that a lot of people are picking up the books in the Traveler Trilogy (Desperate Action, Survival, and Dead End). I’m not currently advertising, so I’m not sure how they’re finding the book. First of all, thanks for reading my books, and I appreciate the reviews that were left. If one of the readers of that book trilogy is reading this, I’d appreciate it if you could leave me a message at the bottom of this post to tell me how you stumbled onto those books. Desperate Action currently has a ranking of 2,065 in the Alien Invasion Science Fiction category. That means it’s not in the top 100 list. I have to guess that the books are showing up in the “More like x” list under someone else’s book.

Escape from the Abyss Series

I’m in the process of investing in professional covers for this series. Yay, finally. The current covers with astronauts are not quite sub-genre correct. These books fit under the space war, maybe space marines, or space opera sub-genre categories. So they should have maybe some faces in the foreground with a space battle going on in the background. The faces have to match the book, too. Right now, there is a female astronaut on The Archons, and Captain Alastor is the primary protagonist in that story.

I usually do my own covers at first. With the exception of the Daphne series. The first book cover in that series was a pre-made cover that I bought while I was still writing the book. It fit perfectly with the story, mainly because I changed elements in the story to make sure she had a really nice laser gun and a suit that repels stun blasts. The rest of the Daphne books were custom covers created by the same designer who did the first book. He did an excellent job with the remaining covers.

Anyway, I’m trying a service this time because they have a relatively quick turnaround and they’re cheap. Well, to be honest, I looked at several different companies and designers and wanted to use Tome Edwards Design. Unfortunately, his covers are about $800 apiece. Which is OK if I’m writing one book, but it’s not a good business decision for 7 books. The reason I don’t want to drop that much money into the covers for this series is because I’m not sure if they’ll earn the money back. That’s the risk. If I knew they were going to take off like wildfire, I’d drop thousands into the covers and smile. So, my decision is to start with one of the cheaper cover designers and work my way up. If this series does well enough, and I think the new covers are holding back sales, I can sink the thousand into really spectacular covers and be happy. Then again, the company I’m using (called Getcovers) might create some eye-popping covers.

See the stuff you have to do when you write books? Before I started writing, I thought writers just wrote. Ha! Now I know that there are all these other “things” that have to be done to get the book published, properly edited, nicely covered, good blurbs, etc.

Well, I have to get back to my WIP… this book isn’t going to write itself.