Orion visits San Francisco

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.

We entered a writing contest!

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!

Blown Away

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!”

(more…)

All New Website

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.

Rustycon 33 – January 15-17, 2016

WooHoo! We’re going to be at Rustycon January 15-17, 2016, in SeaTac, WA. It’s a long-running Pacific Northwest science fiction convention we’ve been to and enjoyed many times over the years. The people are friendly, the writer’s track is awesome, and there’s a food kiosk in the lobby to keep you from starving to death!

Come one, come all! We’ll be at writing panels and at the Cascade Writers booth.Find us out and about or at the Cascade Writers table and get your guild badge ribbons. Everyone gets an orange Xerian Ambassador ribbon. But then you have to decide where your loyalties lie. Do you wear red and swear allegiance to the scientific Bylantians or do you wear purple and swear allegiance to the magical Klymurians.

Hope to see you there!

Free Dreaming of Xeres Kindle Version

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! 

The Audible Book Is Finished!

Yay! It’s taken us two weeks to go over the recording and make corrections. Now we only have to jump through Audible and Amazon’s hoops to get it published.

We hope to have the Audible version available on Amazon around Thanksgiving. The plan is to offer free copies of the Kindle version of Dreaming of Xeres at the time we go live with the Audible version.

Stay tuned!

We’re Making An Audiobook!

We were writing Chapter 2 when we stopped to work on the audio book for Book 1.

What an interesting process. First, we had to determine the parameters for the voice we’d like, then what we were willing to pay per hour. We submitted our requirements on Audible.com and got two responses, each with a demo attached. We listened, debated, and rejected them. So, we listened to other narrators on the board. Then one stood out in the field as perfect: Chris Lang. We LOVED his demo, but he was wayyy out of our price range. When we contacted him and he read our blurb, he signed on to our project anyway, because he believed in our book. His goal is to do the audible versions of all the sequels. Oh, and Orion had to add a new sheet on our spreadsheet: a pronunciation guide.

We have the proof recording now, so we have to listen to it, all 13+ hours of it, then work with Chris on changes. You’re gonna love this audiobook. Chris has such a good grasp of our characters that we find ourselves wrapped up in listening that we’re anxious to see how a scene or chapter ends, even though we wrote it!

 

Happy Birthday, Orion!

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.