Sometimes, even the villains get to tell a story.
The light in the viewing room was subdued today. On display behind and under glass were examples of some of the oldest surviving textiles and tapestries in the world.
Renata Abeille leaned over one special display case, absently stroking one perfectly manicured finger along its edge. My beauty! It’s been so long. Soon, soon, she promised.
Just wanted to give everyone a quick update. Orion’s laptop developed a problem with its onboard graphics that prevented it from even starting up. So after an online search revealed that it was a known problem with that particular MacBook Pro, I set her up with a visit to Apple’s Genius Bar. And since it’s a known problem, they’re going to fix it for free! So that means we won’t be able to do any writing until she gets it back sometime next week. But as soon as she does, we’ll dive right back into Book 2, Running to the Past.
This was the second conference we’ve attended put on by the Greater Los Angeles Writers Society. We learn so much at these conferences: pages upon pages of notes about topics like–how to be better writers, how to better market our book, and how to have a better online presence. Orion and I drive back up to San Francisco this afternoon. If past experience is any indication, we will talk about what we’ve learned the entire six-hour drive plus well into the night tonight. It’s going to be a long, but fun, day.
While we were in Los Angeles, we also took the opportunity to hang out with the very talented Chris Lang, who provided the voices for our characters in the audiobook version of Dreaming of Xeres. We hung out for several hours, talking about topics from all over the spectrum. Eventually, our conversation wandered to the upcoming books in The Third War series and Chris got an earful about what’s in store for Riley, Tessa, Alex and the gang. He’s the first person, besides Orion and me, who has heard the overarching story that will play out across the projected four books in this series. It was cool to let someone in on the secrets and then watch his reaction. As a writer, you always worry about how people will feel about your story but seeing Chris’ reaction to what we have planned had me smiling like a goofball the rest of the night. I felt revitalized after months of feeling like we weren’t making enough progress. Now, I can’t wait to finish the story so that everyone can share in this world we’ve created and see what’s in store for our characters.
Orion left the rainy Seattle area behind and is currently in the San Francisco Bay Area visiting with Kyros before they make the trek to Los Angeles for the Annual Digital Author and Indie Publishing Writers Conference this weekend. They’re excited about several interesting panels there, as well as getting to hang out with their wonderful Audible book producer, Chris Lang.
Kyros took Orion sightseeing today visiting several settings from Dreaming of Xeres, like the cafe Tessa and Diana drooled over the hunky Norse barista in while working.
Next time, they’ll get pics and share them here.
Orion found a writing contest where you could get your story critiqued, then published. The theme for the contest was creatives. The story had to center around someone being creative: writing, singing, painting, etc. We spent a couple hours brainstorming about what we could write that would fit that theme and still tie into The Third War series.
Our idea involved a singing duo who wrote a song and were trying to get a record deal. We made them Xerians who were just waking up and realizing that something was missing in their life. Their third partner. In writing the story, we began by writing their song and then wrote the story around it.
Now that the contest is in the judging phase, we can proudly share this story with you. Head on over to Our World Fell Apart, read the story and then come back here and let us know what you think.
Enjoy!
Keir injects a little magic into Science Day at Great America. Enjoy!
“Isn’t this cool?” Barry bubbled, dancing backward in front of Kier. They were heading to the Gold Striker Roller Coaster, the first stop on their quest.
Kier could only nod, too busy inventorying the stores and eateries and games on either side of them he wanted to check out later.
Around them, Great America hummed, a giant machine waiting to be activated. And it was just for them! He still couldn’t believe he was really there for the Physics-Science-Math day again. They had already picked up accelerometers to perform their tests while riding the coaster.
“I love that we get to ride roller coasters all day,” Barry said, excitement making his voice squeak.
“For science!” Kier shouted, punching the air with his fist.
“Science can be so awesome!”
Our original website was created using do-it-yourself tool popular on the web. It was great for ease of creating a basic presence, but was absolutely horrible to try to keep a blog on. Just getting to the screen where we could start typing a blog took several minutes. We thought we could get around that by writing the blog post offline and then just pasting it in. Sadly, that didn’t help either. The editor stripped out all the formatting from our posts, so we had to go back over everything and reformat it. It became a huge pain to blog there so we started investigating alternatives.
We’d heard from several other authors that WordPress was the easiest to use and that there was a huge author community there that we could connect in to. So I began working during our few off hours trying to build a new site for The Third War. But after two months of beating his head against the beast that is WordPress, I gave up and sought help.
Thankfully, I found Jeremy Tolbert at Clockpunk Studios. He is an author himself and builds websites for other authors. We talked to him about what we wanted for our site and a few things we’d love to have but that we were convinced were pipe dreams. Jeremy sold us on his plan and we signed the contract. Working with him was easy. I’ve only ever had such an easy working relationship with maybe three or four people total. He delivered all we could hope for and more.
Now we’re happy to present to you, our amazing readers, with our new website.
Welcome to The Third War.
The audiobook version of Dreaming of Xeres was finally available as of yesterday. In celebration of all the hard work that went into creating it, we’re making the kindle version of the book free for the next 5 days, from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday. Head on over to Amazon.com and pick up your free copy today! Tell any of your friends who like sci-fi to grab it too. They deserve to get something for themselves while their doing their holiday shopping for everyone else!
Since I’m in Seattle this week, I decided to take Orion out to dinner for her birthday. She’d never been to Claim Jumper so that’s where I took her. The food was good and the portions, as always, were huge. The only complaint we had was that the lights were so low, we couldn’t read our menus.