Posted on

Contribute to Our KickStarter Campaign and Secure Your ARC of Dragonprince #3!

I’ve been talking a lot about this KickStarter campaign lately, and I’ll probably keep on doing it for the next two or three weeks. We’ve got a lot hanging on this campaign.

For one, it’s the only way I get paid for The Dragonprince’s Heir. I’ve already donated the proceeds of the book to the Consortium, so a successful KickStarter campaign is the only way this book is going to help me pay off my newest student loans.

Don’t feel sorry for me. I made the decision to donate those proceeds, and I’m doing just fine financially. Still, I wouldn’t pass up the chance to roll around in a pile of money.

The real reason this campaign is so important to me, is that it offers the opportunity to get a lot of public attention on what we’re doing here. If we can actually raise $30,000 in patronage funding for a book project, we’ll end up with a story in USA Today. Maybe I’ll get to talk to Jon Stewart. Could be fun.

Anyway! I’ve been getting a lot of requests for details about the promised Advance Reading Copy of The Dragonprince’s Heir. For those of you still wondering, no, I haven’t yet announced the requirements (or schedule) for it here. I wanted to do that this week, but it looks like it’ll be early next week instead.

However, as part of the KickStarter campaign, we’ve promised to give ARCs to everyone who makes a pledge (starting as low as $1) by the end of the day today. It’s also a handy way to pre-order a signed copy of the paperback, which isn’t something we usually offer.

So even if all you want is more dragonswarm, this KickStarter has something to offer you. If you really like my work (and want to see more like it), please support the company that pays me to write. It’s a good cause.

But with that said, please don’t feel like a contribution is required to get an ARC. It’s just a perk the Consortium is offering. That’s something else altogether.

I’ll still have a post early next week, as promised, explaining when and where and how to get an ARC, no purchase necessary. I just need to do some really frantic revisions first. But that’s what Saturdays are for, right?

Posted on

The Quest for a New Patronage

My Director of Marketing helped me come up with this tonight. He’s a useful man to know, I’ll say that much.

There are a few things you can count on in fantasy novels: The hero is brave and strong, he always beats the monster, every quest is an adventure, and magic is a useful tool for changing the world.

Unfortunately, reality isn’t always as reliable. The hero might just be an author. The monster might be a stupid and dangerous system propped up by the rich and powerful. The quest might be to get a master work of art into the hands of those who can enjoy it.

But magic…magic is always a useful tool for changing the world. And art is magic. It’s magic you can take part in whether you’re a lover of the arts or a creator yourself.

You may not be able to conjure living fire or will yourself halfway around the world, but you still have the power to battle an evil monster that devours the free expression of art. That monster is called copyright. Together we can beat it, and fill the world with a magic only art can bring.

Please visit this link to see how. Stand with us, hero.

That’s going in the back of Taming Fire and The Dragonswarm for the next couple weeks. Think it’ll spark some interest?

Posted on

Remnant (A Dragonswarm Short Story)

Some of you may have already seen it in A Consortium of Worlds, #2, but I’ve just released a new dragonswarm short story. Set thousands of years before the events of the Dragonprince Trilogy, “Remnant” tells the story of what happened last time the dragons woke.

You can pick up a copy of the short story for $0.99, or get it with a handful of others for just $2.99 in the anthology. It’s a good deal either way.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s a taste of the story:

Rinuld stood deep in the afternoon shadows, nearly invisible among the summer-scorched pines, and thought, What a waste of a perfectly good virgin. He chewed a short strip of bark, more for distraction than for the deadening effect. Otherwise he didn’t move. He made no sound. He only watched.

She was dressed in rags, of course. No sense sending her to die in clothes that still had another year’s wear in ‘em. They hadn’t skimped on the chains, though. Those were iron links solid enough to restrain a raging bear, binding a girl who couldn’t have seen more than seventeen summers. The cuffs on her wrists and the collar at her neck were so heavy they’d long since dragged her to her knees. She slumped against the scarred cliff face, trembling from time to time, but she made no effort to escape.

The cliff face troubled him. It was dead center on the east wall of the valley, situated to catch the dying sunset rays. There was a section of it scraped bare. Six paces tall and almost exactly as wide, flat and square as a townhouse wall. Man-made. It had been smooth, too. Once. Now it was scarred with long, fierce gouges–living granite torn like paper by razor-sharp talons. Soft gray stone stained black with soot and blood.

And anchors made of steel. Not bronze, not cold-wrought iron, but honest steel. A fortune in perfect steel. Five posts of it, driven deep into the stone, and from those anchors ran five iron chains to bind the skinny, pale girl.

Rinuld knew what came next. It would happen at sunset. Teeth like sickle blades would shear through her wrist-thick bonds of iron. A stomach like a furnace would consume the heavy shackles and the tender flesh alike. A pretty little girl would die, and some stupid primitive tribesmen down on the hillside would think themselves safer for another week. Another month. They couldn’t hope for a season.

And perhaps they would be. Perhaps the beast would overlook the tribe that had left the girl in chains. The monsters certainly loved treasures, and there was not much rarer now, not much more precious than human lives.

He’d seen the offer made before, but no one had survived. Not long. He’d met a thousand tribes in a hundred different lands. He’d seen villages and cavehomes. He’d met heathens and hunters and cowards who hid. It didn’t really seem to make much difference. He’d seen every effort to survive, every deal man had made with the harbingers of cataclysm, and none of it had worked.

The Twin Empires had not survived against the beasts. All the Warlord’s armies had barely held the swarm at bay. What hope was there for a dozen dirty tribesmen with nothing more to throw against them than a chained-up, beaten-down little girl?

If you’re wondering what happens next, I’ll give you a hint: Rinuld decides against his better judgment to rescue her. It’s gloriously brutal.

Posted on

Due Dates

My big news for this week is that the masterpiece is done. Late in the day on Thursday, I finished rewrites on the first draft of The Dragonprince’s Heir (The Dragonprince Trilogy, #3).

It’s a good thing I did, because Thursday was my due date for that one. I emailed a copy of it to the three professors on my Master’s Defense Committee: Deborah Chester, J. Madison Davis, and Mel Odom.

Among them, they’ve got hundreds of published novels. They’re going to spend the next ten days reading through it, then on May 3 I’ll complete my Master’s degree by standing in defense of the manuscript. I’ll have to explain the storytelling choices I made, characterization, my publishing plan, all of it.

I’m taking it pretty seriously (I’ve got a lot invested in this program), but I’m not too concerned. I know my stuff, and I’ve really done a good job with this novel. The nice thing about it is that I’ll be getting three hours of detailed feedback from a panel of experts.

I’ll have a month to incorporate their feedback and get a couple rounds of edits from my publishing team before I release it in June.

For those of you just visiting the site to find out where Book Three comes out: That’s good news. We’ve got a complete manuscript a month in advance, so we can definitely get the book out in June.

I’m also excited to have a finished draft so early, because it gives me the chance to offer some Advance Reading Copies again! I’ve had people asking about those at my Facebook page, so I know there’s real interest.

My goal there is to wait until after my defense, process the feedback from my processors (which won’t take more than a week or two), and then send out ARCs in mid-May. Once I’m ready to do that, I’ll announce it pretty loudly here, at Facebook, on Twitter…anywhere you might be listening.

In the meantime, I’ve got another due date pending. The day before my Master’s Defense, I have to turn in 40,000 words for my Writing the Novel class, and I currently have about 15,000 done. The good news: That’ll get me half finished with the Ghost Targets book I was already planning to release in August.

Ah, who am I kidding? It’s all good news. Everything is wonderful. I love being me.

Posted on

Caleb Drake (An Excerpt from The Dragonprince’s Heir)

I just started on the rewrites of The Dragonprince’s Heir, and I already found an excerpt I want to share with you.

Well, I say it’s an excerpt. I should probably call it an excision. It’s three or four paragraphs describing Caleb Drake from the point of view of Daven’s son, Taryn, fifteen years after the events in The Dragonswarm.

It’s also heavy-handed exposition that slammed the story to a crawl, so I’m cutting it. I was planning to save it in a Google Doc somewhere just in case I later decided to refer back to it or maybe work it in at a more appropriate point later in the story.

But it’s solid characterization in a pretty compact form, and it’ll give you a glimpse at two of the main characters (and their relationship) in the upcoming novel. So I decided to share. Hope you enjoy!

Caleb followed behind me like a terrible shadow.

I hated him. I had not always hated him, but I had feared him all my life. Father loved him. Mother loved him. She certainly needed him. But long after the desperate fear of imminent destruction had passed from this place, Caleb remained the shadow of death in my Father’s bright halls. I remembered happy feasts. I remembered storytelling and ballads sung. I remembered joy in the Tower of Drakes, but I had never seen it in Caleb.

Caleb had taught me to fight when I was four. He had given me my first knife when I was six, and taught me how to use it to maim or kill. I was ten when he taught me the mace, and twelve when he taught me to use a crossbow. But he had never taught me to use a sword–my father’s weapon. He had refused me every time I asked.

He was severe and casually cruel. And he was powerful. He commanded more respect within these walls than anyone but my mother. Even she deferred to him, I sometimes thought, though I was likely the only one who knew. And I alone within the fortress did not scrape and bow. I alone did not love our warrior hero. He resented me for it.

Now he would go to meet the king. He would stand by my mother’s side, tall and scary with my father’s blade slung on his back. Forty-thousand men gathered outside the fortress gates, a king and four wizards and six noblemen there in the Great Hall, and Mother would put Caleb forth in balance. And we would win. No frail king of a broken land could challenge the name my father had made.

I’ll probably resist the urge to do more of these, because within a chapter or two I’d be treading close to spoilers, and there are people who care about such things.

Still, this one seemed harmless enough. It’s from the third or fourth page.