Monthly Wrap Up
Sweeping Through September
It’s been a busy month of editing around the fun of activities with friends and family. Our leaves are starting to turn here in the north with the peak around Columbus Day. I usually enjoy this time of year, but it has been wetter and cooler than usual. They said no rain for a week when I checked a few days ago, but of course, we got rain overnight. It messes with my multiple sclerosis. However, I can happily sit at my computer writing for awhile and get back into reading.
Truth Bearer Progress
I finished editing only a few days ago. I’m finding my style of writing the first draft is making the editing process better. I tend to do a little editing as I go, but only when I’m looking back to verify I’m properly bringing information forward, or seeing if foreshadowing was there. I use ProWritingAid to help me find a lot of my writing issues.
Once I felt I had it as polished as I could in Scrivener, I pulled it out into a Word Doc and hammered it with some word searches. One I always do is smile. I smile a lot in real life, but I also find it is one of the go to things I want to put in my writing. How many smile or smiled instances did I have? 211. That may not seem like a lot in a 109K word document, but it reads like a lot. Taking a bunch out and changing things up on 60% of them helped me remove nearly a thousand words. I’m looking forward to my beta readers pointing out other fun things or helping me kill even more of them with better ideas. I have some returning readers who helped with Champions of Light that I expect to have fun with their feedback. It’s always appreciated and it’s time for other eyes on it besides my own.
If you are interested in helping with Truth Bearer, Book 2 of the Light Series, click the picture below to travel to the application. This time I am using Story Origin for sharing it allowing for greater ease of individual commenting and the ability to divide it into sections. I am giving the entire month of October for my beta readers to dig through the manuscript so they have time to thoroughly comment on it.
And yes, that is a teaser off of the book cover draft in my graphic below.
If you haven’t read Champions of Light yet, it is available on Amazon, including KU. The ebook will be part of a Fantasy Free For All on October 6th.
A Classic Retold
I’ve been helping with the launch of A Classic Retold. First was the round of cover reveals in the summer. September was the beginning of the release days. I just ordered the paperbacks of the first three for my October reading time. I’ll be sure to post reviews for them on Amazon and Goodreads. Reviews are part of the lifeblood for any book, so I’ve started making sure I give a review of everything I read. Amazon seems to push books to the front more readily once they have over fifty reviews or so the experts say who calculate these things. If you liked a book, help the author by taking a few minutes to leave an honest review. It will also help readers who like what you do determine if they should read it too.
The following are the book release pictures I used and the blurb given by the author. The titles are linked to where you can by them on Amazon. You can also check out the complete series information at https://www.aclassicretold.com.
Break the Beast
Who is to say who is the real beast?
Grendel haunts the land of Frisia in a restless need for vengeance on the human world that has rejected her. With a fiendish master urging her on, she attacks without fear of repercussion.
But the arrival of a foreign prince causes Grendel to doubt her invulnerability. Beowulf is renowned for killing monsters, and he can have only one purpose in visiting Frisia: to break her hellish reign.
When the inevitable confrontation occurs, the battle between man and beast will change both their lives forever as they find themselves thrust into a quest for truth neither could have anticipated.
Allison Tebo re-imagines the ancient legend of Beowulf in an epic story of redemption and grace in a high-stakes fantasy adventure.
Crack the Stone
I am Valshara, the black stone born of fire. Break me, and my edges turn into knives.
Condemned to a slave camp for her crimes, goblin convict Valshara Sh’a makes a death-defying escape to freedom. But navigating Vindor’s treacherous cavern system is only the beginning of her troubles. An encounter with a rogue king turns her world upside down, and a bargain with fairy tricksters leaves her with a human child she doesn’t know how to care for.
As she tries to smuggle the boy through the walls of a barricaded city, Valshara can’t let down her guard. Because somewhere in the darkness behind her, a bounty hunter rises—relentless as nightfall and merciless as death itself.
Emily Golus re-imagines Victor Hugo’s beloved Les Misérables as an epic fantasy adventure about suffering, redemption, and the extraordinary power of love.
Steal the Morrow
The city may be dangerous, but it holds his only hope…
Abandoned on a remote highway after bandits murder his parents, young Olifur finds safety with Fritjof. The gruff woodsman teaches him and other orphans to live off the land. When Fritjof falls ill, Olifur will risk everything to save his mentor—even travel to far-off Melar seeking a doctor.
However, the city of Melar is more perilous than Olifur imagined, and doctors aren't cheap. His quest leads him first to a hazardous job working on the elevated trains high above the city. But the dangers in the clouds are nothing compared to those on the ground. Olifur soon finds himself ensnared in a web of professional thieves, and he must think fast if he is to survive the day and bring the much-needed aid to Fritjof before it is too late.
Schmidt reweaves Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist" into an exciting tale of integrity and perseverance in this gaslamp-fantasy adventure.
What’s to Come
October is full of things to do.
For the coming quarter, I am in a cohort that will meet once a week with an author and editor I know through one of the groups I belonged to. That group is closing down, but there is still plenty of connection between the members going on in other places. I learned a lot from the crew and expect to learn more in this cohort.
I am still debating if Last of Dragons should go into the Aurora contest being put on by Realm Makers. I can enter even though I have Champions of Light indie published because of where I am with sales. However, I feel odd because I am published and did win a contest with Champions of Light in 2021. I plan on putting my published works into the contests Realm Makers at their July conference next year and into the Blue Ridge Mountain Christian Writers conference. I have a week to think on it since the last day is October 8th.
Part of my thoughts that make me debate it, is I was thinking I could put it here as a serial, chapter by chapter, for people to read much like betas. However, it will be reading in small doses. It will be behind a paywall after the first three chapters. However, there will be incentives to help out with prizes. Help me write and win prizes related to my work. Or just subscribe to help me pay for writing. I have everything set to the lowest price Substack allows of 5 dollars for a month or 30 bucks for a year.
I also have a dystopian novel, Cataclysm, I put on Kindle Vella that seems lost there. I’m thinking of putting it here instead and then I have full control of it again. Expect to see that showing up in October once I have things properly shutdown for it on Vella.
Give me some ideas of what you would love to have as a prize for helping out a writer. I know there are plenty of things we can do.