Been Away Too Long

Since I began composing this post in August, it’s been even longer now! First things first: A happy Holiday season to you, no matter what holidays you celebrate. And may your New Year provide all the good things you desire along with the things that will happen anyway.

Also, congratulations to everyone who did NaNoWriMo this year. I didn’t due to vacation schedules and rewriting rather than, you know, writing, but I’ll see where I am next April.

Looked at the last time I was here, back in May, and less has happened than you might think. Could be good or bad, I suppose.

Anyway, of note: one of my beta readers resigned. His way of educating and mine of learning didn’t mesh, and like one of the characters in my book, he got tired of repeating himself. So, while we still communicate in a friendly fashion, we’ve parted ways. I regret that because I gained a lot from his insights, even if not enough.

So, Coda? and Discoveries (formerly Served Cold) took the biggest hit from that. I’m working through how to rework Coda?, but the failings in Discoveries felt clear, even to me, and I spent considerable time attempting to clarify the story. It’s been sitting for a couple of weeks—close to time to reread and see what else crawls out to demand attention. Then off to my beta reader for an outside opinion.

Since Discoveries has been fermenting, I went back to the first book in this series. I wanted to revisit it, change the covers and make editing changes based on my current understanding of how to write. The first step was to split the book into a novella to introduce people and things, and then a full-length book covering Beckie’s experiences with Ian and the team fighting Werner. New covers took a bit of work, but I’ll reveal them closer to when I republish the stories. The writing was more of an effort, cleaning up POV, deciding which scenes could be kept, which needed revision and which weren’t needed at all. The net-net: the longer piece, now titled Allure, is almost 10000 words shorter than the earlier versions, at 112K words.

So that was in August. Today, I uploaded five files to Amazon (CreateSpace will take a few more days, mostly for creating QR Codes for the links I want to survive). I owe a great deal to Carol for her efforts in cleaning up all of them, and to Phil, as well.

Being in the land of no internetz (save Panera and Micky D’s), it may take a while but I’ll get it. Covers are in the sidebar, along with links. Comments are welcome, especially if you’d like to say something about the covers.

At this writing, the Mercenaries stories include (and are best read in the following order):
Sandfall
Allure
Freedom Does Matter
Connections
Coda?

Coming early in 2016:
Discoveries

In process:
Princess (working title)
Ralf and Catrin (working title)