It’s funny how plans can totally fall apart and you have to rework everything from the ground up… Wait, no. Um…
I take that back. It really isn’t funny. It’s a complete pain in the ass. But sometimes it just is what it is and there’s nothing that you can do about it. Life happens, and when it does you just have to wing it and go with the flow.
So that’s what I’ve done. My timeline for fLUX Runners was pushed back for the sake of an editorial review, which opened my eyes to a lot of bad habits. In the end, well worth it. Even with the slight hit to the ego for not completing by my set date and not having the book published yet.
Currently, it stands with a final formating edit to be completed, final tweaks on the cover art and then to finally publish.
Well in the process of all of this other chaos, I have been working on my draft for JTF13: Widowmakers. My contribution to the Joint task force universe originally created by Alex Piasecki. You can find his original story, Dragon Slayer, for free on Youtube where it was converted into an audio story,
So, Alex’s story led to the creation of the JTF13: Origins anthology, A collection of stories where Marines, soldiers, sailors and airmen take on the forces of the Supernatural, while defending America’s military from the things that come from a deeper darkness than the night. Six tales from the past and present as they meet the supernatural with hot lead and cold steel, in the debut of the new series, JOINT TASK FORCE 13.
If that little bit above looks like I ripped it from somewhere, well that’s because I did. I pulled it from the Amazon listing. Check out the beginnings of this hot new Military scifi universe by reserving your copy today by clicking on the cover of JTF13: Origins.
Shew, that wasn’t such a bad shameless plug, was it? I almost feel dirty…Naw, not really.
🙂
But like I was saying, coming up just as soon as I can finish it will be JTF13: Widowmakers. Grady Sullivan, an army air corps mechanic suddenly finds his world turned upsidedown in an already war-torn Northern France. He comes face to face with an ancient scourge of the land and ordered to eradicate the infestation for the sake of his fellow soldier and the good of the war effort.
Huh…Well hell, that wasn’t too bad either…I think I’m getting the hang of this writing thing after all. 😉
So on top of all of that, I have a novel in work for Christopher Woods Fallen World series. If you love post-apocalypse or the Fallout game franchise, you will fall in love with this series. When I started listening to the first audiobook, I didn’t even make it halfway through chapter one before I sent him a message asking him how many hours of Fallout 4 he had played.
I honestly fell in love with it and cranked out the original 10,000 word short story for Wildcat in 4 days. It struck a chord with me like no other story has.
Now I get to write a full novel.
(school girl squee)
Yes, I am man enough to admit that I let out a squee every now and then. It’s all good, man.
Man, this is a long-ass post… But it has been a while since I put up anything on here.
Alright, so the last thing on the immediate list is my short story, Closet Cases. The start of my
The Intergalactic Rapscallion Adventures Presents: series with this particular story featuring Trae and Fergus, two of the major characters from my fLUX Runners series. I have gone through the process of setting up the KDP account for Three Ravens Publishing and cut my teeth on figuring out this self-publishing stuff. Slight sidetrack from punching in words for Widowmakers, but it’s a productive sidetrack. I’ll have a better idea of what I’m doing when It comes time to push fLUX Runners out, and at the same time, I will be submitting the story for conversion to audio.
Reading list
See, I have been told by many other authors that you have to read to help shut down your own mind, to relax and to build on your own craft in general. There are no new ideas out there. It’s all the same basic story, but the setting, characters and the way it is told has been changed.
Well, my buddy Christopher Woods came over for a visit this past week. We had dinner and sit around shooting the shit for a while. Now the reason that I bring this up is that reading others’ work was a major bit of the discussion. In our conversation about LibertyCon, I dialed up Taylor Anderson to ask him a question. If your first thought jumped straight to Destroyermen Taylor Anderson, you’d be correct. That’s a whole other story in itself…
But we called up Taylor and the conversation swung to that of downtime, stepping away and reading. He tries to read or watch something totally different from the stuff that he’s writing to help his brain shut down. Chris said he did that too, and well hell, way back years ago when I interviewed Ben Bova, he had said pretty much that exact same thing also.
So I started thinking, I read (listen mostly), almost anything. From trash romance to military scifi to historical fiction. I’m all over the board when it comes to likes, really. But just to give a little space to the folks working their asses off to entertain us, I’ll list the couple of books that I finished just this past week. I generally listen to stuff on audible, then I have audiobooks on my work computer that I switch to when my Bluetooth headphones die on me. I’d suggest any of them, they were great little reads (listens).
Then there was the Audible Originals dramatization of Carmilla. OMFG, it was sooooo good and so worth the listen. I was left wanting so much more from the story.
So, that is all that I have for this edition of my musings. Time to get my sorry tail cleaned up and moving so I can make the LibertyCon meeting this afternoon.
Keep your heads up and your pens sharp
~WJR~