I'm back after my half-year hiatus. Starting my new job in May took an incredible amount of focus to get up to speed and fix a lot of the existing problems. Releasing Destiny, having Kanchen die from cancer and needing to finish up some of my professional certifications. All of it kind of knocked me off my feet. I was just trying to sit down and write again in October when my wife became ill and there was concerns that it was cancer. Thankfully that was not the case, but the last three months have been filled with surgeries and spending way too much time in the hospital. In the midst of all of that family trauma, I found myself turning back to writing again.
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One of my problems with getting back to my writing, besides the intensity of everything that was going on for the last six months in my personal and professional life, was that I'd made a mistake in how I'd written Destiny. I've learned there is a balance on how much a writer can switch around between various plotlines within a story and still keep the focus of the reader. What I'd heard from my beta-readers was that the writing was good, but the story switched perspectives around too much and this took away from the story itself. It took me some time to get my head around this. Partly because no one likes to hear that they did less than a spectacular job on a huge project and that then requires some introspection, but also because the story is now setup with so many plotlines that I now realize I need to take back down to the hero's perspective. Although, due to how I've written book two, I will now have to break the various plot lines down into two or possibly three perspectives. I'd like to take it down just one plotline, but it will probably end up being two perspectives. Unfortunately, this is going to take some work to do it right.

It kind of reminds me of a book I just recently finished reading, J. Langland’s The Demons of Atlan series. I loved the concept and how the author put the book together, but the third book in the series jumped between everything that was going on within the universe so much so that it made it difficult to enjoy the story. It doesn’t mean I didn’t like the story itself. It just means the jumping around between various heroes and plotlines was a little too much and detracted from my enjoyment of the story itself. I understand why J. Langland wrote the story this way. There is so much happening that the hero is not directly aware of and is a good part of the story that he wanted to add this in for the reader to enjoy. I ran into this same issues with Destiny. At what point do all of these other parts of the story become too much for the flow of the overall book? Knowing this balance is quite difficult, which is why I’m moving to a more first person perspective for my proceeding books.  

 In November, I just started reading the hell out of several LitRPG novels. I'd never ran into the genre before and I found it very effective in taking my mind off of the multiple surgeries my wife had to have as I went to visit her in the hospital daily. The only problem with using reading as a mental distraction is that I'll read a book in one or two days. It took me no time to read a slew of books in the series. Towards the end of the month I was out of any LitRPG novels that really drew my attention. Some of my top choices in the genre so far are as follows: Aleron Kong's Caos Seeds, D. Rus's Play to Live, Vasily Mahanenko's The Way of the Shaman, Alexey Osadchuk's Mirror World, Andrei Livadny's Phantom Server, G. Akella Realm of Arkon, Luke Chmilenko's Ascend Online, Travis Bagwell's Awaken Online, Christopher Booth's Omnia Online and Edward Castle's Unbound Deathlord series.

At this time, I was at a loss as of what to do to keep myself distracted, and I was unable to feed my current reading addiction for the new genre. Also, I still needed that mental distraction from the surgeries that my wife was going through. It was at this time I got my drive to write back. Part of my writer's block was that I couldn't think of how to start out Book 3 for the Last Paladin Series, so instead I decided to start writing a new series. A FIVR-MMORPG / LitRPG series. Surprisingly enough, my desire to write the new series took off stronger than anything else I'd ever tried writing before. The story is based around a full immersion virtual reality massively multiplayer online roll playing game concept, FIVR MMORG. The entire concept has me so excited and is something that is on the borderline of development right now. It's a gaming concept we could see out within the next five years, since the virtual reality market is on the edge of making this full immersion a reality.

The whole concept of the story takes into consideration my love for gaming and my current discontent with games not being realistic enough. Things like the whole the whole left-mouse clicking to attack action in modern day MMORGs that have left me completely bored with the style of play. Sadly enough, just changing the MMORG came play to a FPS mode doesn’t help the issue either. The action in FPS tends to be spawn attacks that aren’t realistic enough, neither is there a real world that you're playing a part. The fast action FPS game play style currently out right now doesn’t properly fit a fantasy game style. Instead it should follow something like a realistic concepts of a Dungeon and Dragon’s style of reality, there are no world building concepts built into the world, no true storyline. The FPS versions are just blood fests. While interesting on some levels, it is still ends up being boring. I could have the same fun from playing a game of Quake or Unreal Tournament instead.

Another problem I find with most modern games recently is that many of the games are either pay-to-win or win-by-length-of-game-time, both of which I find extremely distasteful. Gaming genres seem to have gotten away from skill-based games. For those of you who don't know what "pay-to-win" is, it's the abilities for players who want to win to simply pay money for better equipment in-game that almost guarantees their ability to win over other players. The win-by-length-of-game-time type of game is games that give players huge boost in abilities just because they've spent a certain amount of time playing. Their ability to win is not based on skill, but simply the bonuses they've been given and the extra weapon options available just because they've been playing the game longer than others. Battlefield 4 was a great example of this. A game that people could run around a building due to the "skill bonus" they were given, before new players could reach the edge of one side of the building, or a veteran having access to better guns that can kill in one or two shots, while the new player’s gun can empty an entire clip into a veteran without being able to kill them. This type of winning is simply from game companies rewarding players for being in game with longer play time that newer players that allows them to win. Basically built off of the pay-to-win model, since the skills being given out to players in these games aren't due to how well the player played, nor is it available to everyone equally.

I hope and believe that in the future games will get away from these types of models. That gamers will be bored with this "dumbing down" of games and will want more skill and balanced game play. That games will have a world to discover, that there will be a strategy gaming component that could be accessed and that there will be a skill component for the actual in-game combat system, along with bonuses that are earned and not simply given due to someone having just spent extra money or extra time within the game. I wrote a novel of the gaming world I'd like to actually play some day in the future.

It took me a little over a month to write Book 1 of The World. The cover is basically finished and ready to go. The only thing I'm trying to do is pop-out two more books. My goal is to have all three ready to before May. As long as I can keep writing the way I am, I believe this should be more than possible to do. Also I already have the covers completed for Book 2 & 3. Anyway, this is just a quick heads-up as to where I've been and what I’ve been doing. I hope you will want to check out my new series. For those of you waiting on Book 3 of The Last Paladin series, don't worry. I'll be continuing that storyline too. I just needed a break to decide how best to start book 3.
 

​     Now that I have two books out, I made the decision to offer Flight up for free for five days to give new readers a chance to check out my story and hopefully have a number of new fans interested in picking up Destiny to see the continuation of Startüm’s story. So far, I’ve been super excited about the initial response both books have been receiving.
     Before releasing Flight I went through the text and cleaned up a lot of areas that were rough from my first edits and tweaked the story with a couple new paragraphs, here and there, to fix/fill-in gaps left within the storyline. I also streamlined a few of the fight scenes to get a better overall flow to the story like I managed to do in Destiny. At the same time, while I love the overall storyline that I came up with for Flight, I could definitely see the difference of my writing skill between the beginning and the end of the book. Destiny, on the other hand, didn’t have that feel. Instead there is a solid consistent voice and solid complex plotline throughout the story, from beginning to end, that I really love and think is great. Thankfully, I’m happy to say that, after much tweaking with my last edit of Flight, I feel that many of those rough spots were smoothed out nicely leaving behind an even better story for readers to enjoy. Although my grammar perfect friend would probably beg to differ with my evaluation at my skills in corrections, it is as good as I can get it with my current skill set at this time.  
     While it is always scary to put your stories out to the wide world. At the same time, there is nothing like the feeling you get as a writer when reading the positive feedback from fans who love your work. For me, it’s the most powerful motivator in getting back to planning out the storyline for the next book in the series. This is exactly what I needed to put my mind in the right place to build the outline to book three, especially after the last ten months of my life. There is always a risk that people will ignore your work or not like what you’ve written, but so far that has not been the case. For those of you who have expressed your enjoyment of my books, I thank you.
     For those of you who didn’t know, I work for the United States government in Europe. About ten months ago to the day, I found out that my job would be going back to America without me. It came to me, six months after the new management team moved in, that my supervisor and his boss were brought in as basically a hatch team to close up shop. In the preceding months since, the work has become exceedingly difficult as people leave and the work continues to mount. Overall it has been an exceedingly stressful time of my life. Unfortunately, having my work close in Europe at this time also has put a huge strain on my family, especially since my daughter is finishing up her pre-college exams and we are in the process of getting everyone green cards. Even worse, the new management has been treating the entire team like we were already let go. All in all it’s been a pretty messed up situation, but, luckily, I found a new home. Something not easy to do in my situation working overseas. I just got that incredible news Thursday of this week, which went along perfectly with my release of Destiny.
     Other major stressful events during this ten month time period was dealing with my baby Kanchin, a lab/border-collie mix, who has been extremely sick with cancer. We dealt with a swath of surgeries and chemo therapy treatments, but unfortunately that only extended his life for around eight months. He died the end of March, a couple days before the passing of my Grandmother. My Grandmother’s death had its own challenges. She’s one of the few family members I’ve chosen to keep in my life and, to be honest, if it weren’t for her I’d have probably starved to death in some closet before I was six years old, so I owe her in so many ways. Unfortunately, I couldn’t fly out to see her before her death, but at least I had a chance to skype with her one last time and to thank her for everything she did for me before she passed away. The last excitement we had going on was Kanchin’s brother, Rowin, who had to have major surgery this week, which turned out to be successful. Somehow, throughout all this turmoil, I was able to finish Destiny and get it published. In many ways, focusing on my writing has been a good way for me to get through this difficult time.
      For those of you who like the new back ground, I’ve attach the image below. It’s not perfect, but I think it looks cool. You can’t normally see the part of the blended image, since the web sites’ content blocks the area where the image has been combined. Even so, I think it came out sweet and I love having both covers displayed on the background of the website. If anyone is interested in how I did the combined image of the two book covers into one, just let me know and I’ll do a blog about the process for creating the image. 

​     For those of you who have been waiting a long three years for the release of book two of The Last Paladin Series, you can find the link to the newly released book here: http://www.amazon.com/Destiny-Last-Paladin-Book-2-ebook/dp/B01ECDDYEO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1460801253&sr=8-2&keywords=jason+cheek The ebook should be readily available, but if you don’t have the option to purchase the book immediately, you might have to wait another twenty-four hours for it to be truly “published” on Amazon. Still, it has been released and is just waiting for Amazon to finish their internal processes to make Destiny available in all formats.
     I’m excited to hear people’s feedback on the story. You’re welcome to post or email me your thoughts on the story, and, if you like the story, please leave a positive review on Amazon … Goodreads too if you feel so motivated. Positive reviews on Amazon does two awesome things. First, it lets me know you enjoyed the story. Second, it helps other people who are into the same genre find my book and enjoy the story. Both of which gives me that awesome motivation to continue writing and coming up with new exciting content.
     Writing and releasing your work is an intensely personal experience of sharing and putting yourself out there for other’s to judge. Every review that comes in, good or bad, a writer checks out and reads. I’ve had a good review left on Flight completely make my bad day into an awesome day where I go home and write more, even though I’m exhausted from working an entire day in the office.
    In regards the story, I’ve tried to do a few new things in Destiny. I hope you like the changes, but I’m still getting a feel for my preferred writing style to an extent. While Startüm is still the main hero, there are a number of supporting characters who have their own parts of the story that they are telling. Also, in the final battle scene, I brought in a lot of small sub-characters to give readers the feel of the overall battle and what was happening in the background that would have otherwise been impossible to share with you, the reader, otherwise. I hope this jumping around the battlefield enhances the story for your reading pleasure and doesn’t detract from the story or my writing style. Also, the supporting characters that are telling their part of the story I picked up from Game of Thrones. A world has a lot of things occurring in it as people within the story go about their business. I tried to keep these perspectives in line with Startüm’s overall story, so they are relevant. Also, I enjoy sharing different parts of the action scenes from various characters’ perspectives, although I tried to not repeat the same view as much as I did in Flight.
     I think it’s much more in-depth in many ways than Flight. Destiny ended up coming out to be 569 pages in length, if you discount the glossary I added to the back of the book and the other extra pages that shouldn’t be counted. I had a lot to cover with the story, between introducing Irlendria and the species living within the world and the new characters within the storyline.  
     Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story.

     ​If you’re not a dog/pet lover, you will probably want to bypass this post. While I’ve been working to get Destiny’s released, I’ve had a few other major emergencies going on in my life. One of them is making sure I have new employment, ever since I’ve learned my job is going away in the near future. The other, is that one of my boys, a lab/border collie mix, came down with cancer and became very sick. Both have recently played major roles in my life and have played their parts in extending Destiny’s release date further than initially planned.
     Not everyone is a dog lover. Not everyone looks at other species as being relevant. Maybe this lack of empathy for other species comes from some humans’ being so tribal that can’t see another race as being worth consideration, or maybe these people lack empathy to such an extreme that they cannot relate to even other human beings outside of their family, city or even country, let alone make the jump of caring about another species. Whatever it is, it’s something that crosses my mind when I see the inhumanity some people have towards each other and the species we share this planet with. It’s a topic that I plan to cover more in books three and four of the Last Paladin Series.
     The biggest thought I had for the series is exploring the difference between long lived species and shorter lived species, and the friendship and love relationships that can form between these different species. The pain that that is felt for the loss of a loved one when their shorter lifespan has ended. The joy and wisdom that is shared and given from that shorter lifespan relationship that goes beyond the precepts of one’s race and culture. The relationships that can be formed at times between that of simply two souls. In this way I would like to keep the life of Kanchen alive and share his story, but in an Urban Fantasy style.
     Kanchen and Rowin are two brothers who became part of my life after hurricane Katrina swept through Florida in August of 2005. At the time they were only around twelve months old, a guesstimate given by the vet who first gave them their shots after my friend Mike’s Mom found them running around in the middle of a major highway the day after Katrina came through. I instantly fell in love with them and they became a part of my life as of that time.

     ​This time period was just after my epiphany that allowed me to leave the abusive relationships I’d been a part of for all of my life, up to a point shortly before that in time, and to make life into something amazing and special that I lived every day. Between traipsing all over Florida to traveling to Europe and visiting France, Germany, Poland and Hungry, together Kanchen, Rowen and I had one fantastic adventure after another and just enjoyed living life. While both brothers stole my heart away, Kanchen was always at my side and loved me to death. Except for a very short time period during their teenage years, I never needed lines for them. I’ve always communicated well with dogs, but the shared understanding I’ve had with Kanchen and Rowin bordered on telepathic.
     In many ways our relationship is part child, part best friend and part life companion. No matter how old or full of gray hair Kanchen and Rowin are, they will forever be my babies. Most people cannot believe how intelligent and personable they both are when they meet them for the first time. How much they are like little people. But then, I’ve never treated them other than little people.
     Right now I worry that Rowin will be too depressed without his brother. They’ve always have been together for their entire life. The longest they were separated was when they flew to Europe. All that we can do is give Rowin lots of love and help him through this difficult time in his and our lives.
My family and I thought that Kanchen was on the upper side of the curve for surviving his cancer. Our recent CT scan showed that the tumor was shrinking and responding well to the chemo treatments we’d been giving him. Unfortunately, yesterday a vein burst in his tumor and he died shortly thereafter. I was covered in my baby’s blood as he bleed to death and there wasn’t anything I could do to save him. Needless to say, yesterday and today have been rough for us all. I spent the day looking over some of the old pictures of Kanchen with my wife as we remembered and missed him. For those of you who are interested I’ve attached them below.
     I’d hoped to get most of Flight cleaned up this weekend. I want to have a cleaned up copy uploaded before I release Destiny. I did have a chance to work on this a lot last week, but so far this weekend has been a bust. Maybe tomorrow and Monday I can work on it some before I have to head back to work. If anything it will help distract me from the ache in my heart. Either way Destiny will be released in April. For those of you whom are anxiously awaiting the release, I’ll do my best to make it sooner rather than later. Hope everyone has a wonderful Easter. 
       ************ I love you Kanchen and you will be missed. ************

​     The whole process of getting the cover of your book “print ready” for Amazon is one of the more difficult and convoluted processes in the whole self-publishing process for new authors; besides, of course, the actual writing of the book and getting it properly edited. Even knowing which size template to use for a mass market paperback is difficult to understand. While there are a lot of author websites and blogs that talk about different aspects of the process, none that I ran across in my searches warned you about the typical pitfalls of the self-publishing process that a new writer should be aware of. Luckily this gave me a lot of material to write about for my blog. With Destiny’s release I plan to post as many of the points I missed the first time around.  
     When you first go to https://www.createspace.com to start the book creation process, one of the first things you need to make a decision on is the size of your book. Well, that and whether or not you to use an ISBN or an ASIN number. You can check my previous blog for that whole option here: http://www.thecheekyfellow.com/home-blog/what-are-asin-and-isbn-numbers-and-why-do-i-need-them The short of it is to just go with the free ASIN and save yourself the cost, but back to our “print ready” cover. Even if you want to only have an eBook at https://kdp.amazon.com, Amazon requires that you first create a print book and format it properly. Only then does Amazon allow you to convert that printed book into an eBook, so no matter what you are forced to build two separate templates; one template for your physical book and one for your eBook. Also, each different size book requires you to reformat your text to fit the new template you choose to additionally use. This includes restructuring the cover for your book. The one good thing is that the cover template for the physical book and the eBook can be used without changes, but that total text restructuring between the two types of books is time consuming. One additional side note: when you go with an audio version of your book you’ll need to reform the cover for your book to fit the audio book’s unique requirements, which are very different than either the physical or eBook formats.
     Another annoying point I ran into with the release of Flight and something that I couldn’t find any information about at the time was that the smallest book you can go with on Amazon is the 5.06 X 7.81 template, which is as close as you can get to a normal sized mass market paperback that we all are familiar with when self-publishing through Amazon. It’s confusing when you get to the template choice for your book and nothing fits what you’re expecting as you measure one of your paperbacks at home and compare it to the selection that Amazon gives you for templates to choose from, so hopefully this part of the blog helps you at this point especially. After much research I discovered that Amazon doesn’t allow you to self-publish a normal sized mass market paperback book. One additional FYI on this point, the 5.06 X 7.81 template is slightly larger than a normal sized paperback book.
     A slight rant: I guess Amazon wanted their paperback to stick out slightly on any bookshelf. While a part of me found this to be annoying, I will say that at least I found the quality of the physical books from Amazon to be exceptionally good. Something that makes you proud to hand out/sell when friends and colleagues question if you’re a “real writer” or do you actually have a “physical book” of your work. For some reason, if you only had an eBook published people think that’s quaint, but if you actually have a printed book in the hand, you’re taken more seriously as a writer. It doesn’t make any sense. Most of your sales will be eBooks and not physical books, but that doesn’t matter, people will still judge you on having a “physical book” of your work. 
     Carrying on with the publishing process, once you download the template you’ll have one for the cover and one for the text. The cover template looks like this:

​Now you need to have your base image that you’re going to use for your cover. I have several posts about cover creation process and this is the only area where I outsourced the work. It costs, but if you’re smart and shop around you can find artists that are good and affordable. Also, it’s the only way most of us can get a truly high-quality, professional image for our work that we can use to compete with a normal publisher’s cover art. Some of my previous posts on the importance of a good cover is here: http://www.thecheekyfellow.com/home-blog/self-publishing-finding-an-artist-for-your-book and here http://www.thecheekyfellow.com/home-blog/cover-design-and-book-twos-artwork The basic image file I received back from the artist Leoblack is the PDF below. He also gave me one that was just a pure image, but I chose to use his title design this time around because it just rocks.

     One of the things I requested from the artist I’m working with is to have the option to remove the text that they’ve inserted to be able to replace it with my own design and format. On both of my books the title has been slipped behind parts of the main character, and I need that graphic layer available to be able to make any future changes I desire. On the image for Destiny, I really like how DLeoBlack did the font for the Title and my name, so I kept his design. I also made sure to ask DLeoBlack for the name of the font he used ahead of time. This is important for the creation of the rest of the text on the cover, since sometimes it’s hard to know just by going through the lists of fonts which one your artist actually used. Having the same font used throughout the text on the cover is an important design concept in graphic design. Not using multiple fonts on your cover design will help give your work that “professional look” to its overall layout and design. While I didn’t keep the exact “title” that DLeoBlack used for the back cover of the book and the spine, I did keep the same font and the general drop shadow and bevel/emboss stylized look that he used on the front cover’s title.  

     While this post is not a tutorial on how to work with Photoshop and the program’s various effects, I would like to point out the design concept of using multiple layers so that you can keep each of your text, their effects and position separate. It makes moving, resizing and finding the text in question a lot easier at this point in the process. You don’t need to use Photoshop for this process. Paint Shop Pro was an old standby I always used before I was able to get a copy of Photoshop. At the time layers weren’t part of the program, but now must graphic applications have layers. The good thing about Photoshop is that it imports nicely into Illustrator, which is kind of important for the “Print Ready” graphic that I want to have produced at the end of this process. I’m sure there are other applications out there that could do the same thing, I just don’t know them, so I’ll be showing you my process using Illustrator.
     Once you have the image looking the way you want it, the next step is to save your work with your multiple layers. You’ll need this for getting the next step correct. At this point in time I make a separate image and flatten the layers into one image. I copy this and then open the template for the cover I downloaded from Amazon inside Illustrator. Just a warning, the template will not automatically open in Illustrator.
     Now paste the image from your graphic program, Photoshop for me, into the template you have open in Illustrator. The image will be huge and cover the template. You’ll want to move the image’s opaque transparency settings down to something like 50% and resize the edges of the image until it is completely covering the outside edge of the template. The semi-finished product will look something like the graphic below, but once you have it in place you will want to set your image’s transparency settings back to 100%.

​     At this point you will see this black outline of a square on top of the image. In Illustrator this is the print area. This is easy to change by dragging the outlines of the print area. One way is to click on File, Document Setup and Edit Artboards. Another is to click on effects, artboards and selected images, but either way you will want your artboard to highlight this image only. You can confirm your print selection in the print preview options.   

     Once you have this selected properly you are ready for the next very important step. It is essential that you do not “print to PDF”. Print to a PDF will not work for a “print ready” image and will leave a white boarder around your image that Amazon will deny for your “print ready” graphic for your cover. The trick here is to File, Save As and select the output to be a PDF and not an AI extension for Illustrator. At this point you can select the settings that are in the instructions for formatting the compression of the image. Settings like the Compatibility to be Acrobat 4 (PDF 1.3) and the Standard to be PDF/X-1a:2003 and setting your compression on the image. 

​     If you leave your Color Bitmap Image & Grayscale Bitmap Image compress at 150 ppi & 225 ppi you’ll get an image that’s around 5 to 6 MBs in size. If you up these settings to 300 ppi & 450 ppi you’ll get an image around 18 to 20 MBs in size. Doing zero compression will leave you an image size approximately 50 to 60 MBs in size. In the past I’ve used the 5 to 6 MB sized files, but this time I might try the 18 to 20 MB sized file for my image. Once you “Save PDF” you’ll see your PDF image has no boarders if you did everything correctly. It should look something like the image below:

     ​While this looks finished, I’m still tweaking the back cover’s hook. Interestingly enough, when you print out the image and share it with your friends in this format you end of getting a lot of good feedback. There is something about having the image in your hand that allows you to see mistakes or areas to improve better than on the screen. As you can see I’ve justified the text for the hook, lined up the spine’s Title and Author name a little better and corrected some of the spacing issues between the edge of the book and the spine. Since I’ve documented the whole process, this will be a piece of cake to jump back into Photoshop to make the needed corrects and then recreate the images I need via Illustrator. I probably could have done much of the text work in Illustrator, but I’m better in Photoshop and there seemed to be a lot more built in effects to apply to my text.
     I hope this post helps those of you who are working hard to get that first book published. For me this post will work as an excellent procedure to have for future publishing, since by the time I’m pushing out book three I will have forgotten this process again. For now, I’m wishing everyone a great weekend and signing off. 

​     For the last month and a half I’ve been focused on getting Destiny ready for publication. I’ve cleaned it up as much as my limited editing skills allows and I hope some of my beta readers and friends can help with the rest. While grammarly.com has an amazing product, it still misses the finer issues that my grammar experienced friend has affectionately pointed out that afflict all of my works. She corrected the first page of Flight pointing out some of these issues I commonly make, and to be honest, I simply can’t catch them with my current skillset as of this time.  
                It’s frustrating on one level, but at the same time I know practice makes perfect. Every time I write and then correct my mistakes my skills improve. Sadly, I have no desire to wait for my grammar perfect friend to get around to correcting the story before I release Destiny. After much though on this conundrum, I’ve decided to go ahead and go with what I have. I’ll be making a few more additional tweaks and corrections to Destiny’s overall storyline as necessary as I get additional feedback, but once that’s finished I’ll release Destiny.
            The good thing is that I can update the story any time as needed. With Amazon.com I can update the Ebook in an hour, which is where 99% of my sales are. I can also do the regular book, but the process is much more time intensive. As my grammar perfect friend gets around to correcting Destiny, I can always update those results directly to the new release at that time, which allows me to share the story now instead of later. I’m still expecting a March release, but worst case scenario is that Destiny will be pushed back until April.  
            I’m getting a lot of good feedback. Some I’ve decided to not implement, because the story stands on its own, while other things I have included. These points have been important enough that I don’t want to release before I get back a few more reviews from my beta readers. A fan named Aharon was nice enough to give me some excellent feedback on the story. One of his suggestions was to put in a Glossary of terms and characters, which I’ve already put together and attached to the story. Also he helped me clean up the text where I was referring to High Elves as both Gray and High. While some of us geekier old D&D players know that High & Gray Elves are the same, probably most of my other readers won’t know this ahead of time, which could cause some major confusion in the storyline. To keep matters clear I ended up going with the term “High Elf” to stop the confusion. Another friend/fan, Richard helped me clean up how I structured the chapters, and let me know he really like the overall characters and storyline.
            Over the next two weeks I’ll be getting the cover edited with my overview of the story and other parts of the title and author name stuff that goes on the binder of the book. To answer one of the questions about getting a cover “ready for print”, I plan to take comprehensive notes for how I turn my image into a “print ready image” needed for the final step of publishing. There are separate layouts for the eBook and the actual physical book, which takes time to get everything formatted properly. I’ll be getting both of those ready to go while I’m waiting for everyone’s feedback on the story before publishing. Once that’s completed, I’m going to see if there is any way to cleanup Flight a little bit more, since I’ll be promoting Destiny with Flight and it would be nice if the story is in as good of shape as possible and start planning out the outline for Book three.   
            Of course while all of this excitement is going on, I’ll be dealing with the IRL issues that we all face on a daily basis. One of those is hopefully a new job. A little less than a year ago I learned that my position was going away due to my organization consolidating their HQ’s around the world, so if I want to stay in Germany a little bit longer (which is needed due to some family situations going on) then I needed to find a new organization to work for. Due to my line of work and living in a foreign country, this job change comes with a number of unique challenges. Hopefully I’ve found a new home with a pretty cool boss. Preliminarily it looks great, but I won’t know 100% until I have the final job offer in hand. Until then keep your fingers crossed and wish me luck.  
            The other big issue affecting my family is that Kanchen has been diagnosed with a very aggressive form of nasal cancer. The good news is that he’s over the 90 day hump so to speak, since he’s still alive and the chemo therapy that our doctor came up with is doing surprisingly well. The bad news is that it’s expensive, but what can you do. Hopefully Destiny can help cover some of his medical costs once it’s released. Other than that I’m realizing I need to start hitting the books again to up my IT certifications. I’m going to have to work that into my writing, family and life schedule.
I’m really excited about Book three of the series and can’t wait to get down and dirty on the story creation process. I’m always looking and reading for ideas to integrate into my story and recently I ran into several interesting fight scenes from the movie Sucker Punch. I’ll add in the scene from one of my favorite fight scenes from the movie. There are actually several that I think were awesome, and it was a toss-up between the Dragon and Samurai fights. Still, the Samurai fight scene won out. I don’t know how good the overall movie is. It did get terrible reviews, but the write-up I came across to what the story was symbolizing was actually pretty interesting. Even if the overall story does suck, the battle scenes I ran across on Youtube.com were amazing!    
     Anyway, due to everything going on, my blog has taken a backseat for the time being as IRL takes precedence. Hopefully now that my major editing of Destiny has been finished I’ll have a chance to blog more. 

​     I’ve been working my ass off to get the editing completed for Destiny in the midst of … well life. I always have several something going on, besides working a full time job in a foreign country and doing my best to get Destiny corrected and released. Usually I practice Zen and do my best to live in the now, while planning the best I can for the future. It’s a good perspective and I usually keep positive, but as with all of us, I have my down times too.
     Most recently that was last Friday. I’d spent the beginning of the week rushing my baby Kanchen to the vet to get him on chemo therapy to slow down the growth of his aggressive nasal cancerous tumor, along with a few other lesser emergencies that hit, when I just had to zone out and get some stress relief reading in. Reading for me is a way to make everything go away. I love a good adventure story, so I recently went to one of my new favorite authors E. William Brown. I just love his Fimbulwinter (Daniel Black Series). You can find the first book here: http://www.amazon.com/Fimbulwinter-Daniel-Black-Book-1-ebook/dp/B00KZ41LHM/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 His Daniel Black Series freaking rocks! I read all three again as I was running around with my head chopped off getting stuff resolved which put me back where I needed to be. Don’t worry; I still took the time to work on the editing of Destiny whenever I was home, except for Tuesday. Tuesday was the day I just completely zoned out after I got home and collapsed.  
     The whole week was crazy and didn’t let up. Friday I was really feeling the strain when I saw I’d gotten two back-to-back before I left work on Goodreads. I can’t even begin to tell you how awesome that made me feel. It was exactly what I needed to go home and spend more eye-bleeding time focused on editing Destiny over the whole weekend, whenever I had a second to sit down. Even after driving three hours into work and doing a full day at the office, I can’t wait to get home get working on finishing p my editing for Destiny. So, this is a big thank you to Demian and TheBADboys for the kudos! It also pushed my Flight’s rating to 4.0!
     That's not to say thank you for everyone else who has given me good reviews, because reviews are the break and butter for any writer. Besides giving you the motivation to keep going, it always lets other people know your book is worth checking out. There's no better advertising then that! So for everyone who has been kind enough to take the extra time to leave a review, I thank you. 
     Although I’m getting better at editing, mostly due to Grammarly.com’s program getting much better at finding mistakes, it is still a lot of work. It’s the “poor man’s” editor. Still, better than paying a professional editor money I don’t have for the same level of accuracy. My goal before I start handing Destiny out is to get a clean read-through without finding any errors. Right now grammarly still has me in the 2000+ critical error range, but like I said, I’m working through them as fast as I can.
     My wife and I spend most of the weekends catching up on watching our shows together. We finally just caught up with Vampire Diaries and just started The Originals. Don’t laugh, I never knew just how good Vampire Diaries were until this last Christmas break where we caught up the whole five plus seasons. Also just as we caught up on that, Arrow, Gotham and Flash just started up again thankfully.
     Anyway, that’s it for now. Just know I’m working hard to get the editing finished. Yea yea, as always I overestimated just how long the editing was going to take, but this is my first 650 page book! 

     Before I start out, I just wanted to wish everyone a belated Happy New Year for 2016. I hoped everyone enjoyed their celebrations and that the New Year brings happiness and joy.
     I made it through my first “flow editing” of Destiny on January 3rd, 2016. If any of you are wondering what the hell a first flow editing is, it’s my terminology for looking at how the story sounds and the paragraphs flow together for the overall storyline of the book. Basically to make sure I’m happy with how everything turned out. That statement might sound a little odd for those of you who don’t write, but it makes more sense once you put it into perspective.
     Planning a storyline for a book out can take months, and that’s after you’ve developed your world and concept. Writing the story itself takes a lot longer. Flight took me a year and a half to write. Destiny over two years and I still haven’t finished all of the corrections. Try to keep track of the entire flow of a story, the quality of the writing and have it all mesh together just right over that kind of time period. It’s not exactly easy. Add on top of that, with Destiny I chose not to re-read what I’d previously written. Why? Because I can’t properly look at the story later on clear enough to correct my mistakes when it comes time for editing.
     Sounds crazy? Trust me, it’s not. Try reading a story twenty or forty times over as do your best to search for the mistakes you’ve made in the story’s flow and grammar. The first time you can see them clearly, but you still have missed a lot. The second time you read through the story you catch another batch of mistakes, but there are still more. The third time you read through the story you find mistakes, but it’s much harder. By the tenth time it’s nearly impossible. Your mind replaced the words that are there automatically without you even realizing it. By the twentieth time you are well past the time you need a second set of eyes.
     This was my problem with Flight. I re-read the chapters so many times as I was writing the story, that by the time I needed to edit the story for final production I couldn’t hardly read through the text to see the errors I’d written. This isn’t only an issue with me. My friends who were helping me with the storyline and editing afterwards had the same issues.
     With Destiny I tried a different tactic to combat this problem. Mainly I’ve done my best not go back to the beginning of the story to re-read what I’ve previously written, until I was finished with the overall story and was at the editing stage. I’ve also mostly have done the same with sharing out the story to my friends. After the first year, I shared out Destiny to some of my friends to see if they liked the general flow of the story to see check my material. Everyone liked what they read and wanted more, but I purposely kept the rest of the story private. From that first test read I was able to get enough feedback to know I was on the right track. I’d decided that the next time I share out the story it would be when it was finished and as cleaned up as I could possibly make it. Only in this way I figured could I get the best shot at getting my novel edited properly before final distribution.

     Finding grammar and editing errors is extremely difficult, for me anyway. I don’t seem to poses the grammar Nazi gene, but slowly and with electronic help, I can fake it somewhat. If not for http://grammarly.com I’d be lost. There is a curve to writing properly and editing itself. What’s awesome with GRAMMARLY.COM is that the program shows you your errors and explains why it is wrong, and then it suggests ways for you to correct your dangling participle or sentence fragment until you get it right. I found that after I’d been using the program that my writing grammar skill altogether had dramatically improved.
     If you haven’t used GRAMMARLY then you’re missing out. They even offer their basic program for free. That doesn’t mean the program doesn’t have issues or is perfect, because it’s not. Still it’s the cheapest editing help that you’ll ever get. When using the program you’ll want to save regularly. It does freeze at times and sometimes completely locks up and you have to restart the program. The worst part about the re-starts is that it doesn’t remember your previous ignores and such, so if you have to either just jump to the page the program locked up on at the point of your last save or quickly go through the previous texts and reselect ignore. Sounds easy enough, but it becomes more time consuming when you’re talking about 6,000 or 10,000 errors you’re trying to correct. Even with all of these small annoying problems, grammar’s program is freaking awesome and is the Poor Man’s … I mean Poor Indie Writer’s editor.
     Even with Grammarly’s help, you’re still going to have pay attention. Not all of the suggested corrections the program makes is always right for what you’ve written. A mistake I learned the hard way when I first used the program on Flight. Later on, I had to go back and correct my mistake, which was time consuming on top of being a pain in the ass. Once you done your best and have re-read the story to the point where you can’t find any additional errors on your read through, that’s when you ask your friends for help. The goal from my own experiences and everything I’ve read is that you want to be able to read through your entire story and NOT find any additional mistakes. Mistakes are not issues where you could write a sentence one way or another and you keep going back and forth. Mistakes are misspelled words, grammar issues or false information, just so we are on the same sheet of music.  
     Once you done all of this you can decide whether or not you want to go with a professional editor. Going with a professional is something all of us would love to do, but the reality is that most of us simply can’t afford it. We just don’t make the return of profit with self-publishing to have this as a viable option. Still no matter what, you need to do your best to clean up your story. If not it really makes your work unreadable and opens your work up to attack, which is something you don’t want in your reviews.
     No matter how good of a job you do at editing your work, Grammar Nazi’s are just a part of life when you’re a writer. I had one reviewer tell me that they would have gave me five stars if not for my Grammar mistakes, so instead they gave me two. Cruel comments like that is just a fact of life for Indie Writers. It’s something that makes me laugh, in a sad way, when other Indie Writers give nasty reviews about editing when they know you tried your best to clean up the story. Even worse is when you have a good story and you’re doing well as a new writer only to have someone who has been published and now has access to a professional editor giving you a hard time. Not that having a professional editor means you won’t have grammar or story content mistakes. I’ve seen both in professionally finished published products. Unfortunately, being attacked by these Grammar Nazi’s and jealous writers trying to put their competition down is just par for the course. Thankfully not all writers are dicks. 

     Anyway, I’m doing the best I can to get through the editing part as quickly as I can so that I can get Destiny published. Once I hand it off to my friends, I’ll have to work on the back cover part, which is another eye bleeding difficult process. I’ll try to give up lots of good information on that process. Overall, I’m really like how the story has turned out. I do have a couple places where I explain a little bit more about the world of Irlendria and the different species and their cultures, but I’ve tried to keep those parts interspaced with the action to keep the story moving and a relevant part of the storyline. I can’t wait to get feedback from my friends and beta readers about the story.
     On a personal note, I have confirmation that my Kanchen has sarcoma cancer of the nose. No matter what, the prognosis is not good. My baby could have anywhere from three months to a year to live, but more than likely we’ll be lucky to get six months more with Kanchen. I heard about a chemotherapy pill treatment that might help slowdown the growth of the tumor. I’ll be meeting with the vet in a week to see if that’s truly an option and something we can afford or not. Also, I don’t want to give my baby chemo if it makes his quality of life horrible before his death. Right now, my wife and I are doing a kind of Hospice for him. Basically making his life as comfortable as possible with lots of walks and treats before he’s taken away from us. For now, he’s mostly happy and eating well. I try to keep his nose clean when the blood starts running down his face and hold him lots. Still, it’s a heart breaking situation. I’ve added a picture of Kanchen after his surgery where they released some of the pressure from the tumor growing over his eyes and trimmed back to tumor as much as they could. 

     Monday night I was finally able to catch the new Star War’s episode with my buddy Alan on the way home after work. It’s kind of funny where we caught the movie. Sitting in a German movie theater and watching the film in English, instead of catching the movie on base. I would have loved to have seen it on opening night, but I’d have been forced to go alone. While I was an option, honestly I’d rather see the movie with a friend. While I’ve gotten my wife into some Sci-Fi and a lot of superhero movies and TV shows, she’s still not a fan of hard Sci-Fi, so basically anything with deep space is mostly out. Did you catch the word “mostly”? I think she would actually enjoy some of the hardcore Sci-Fi stuff if she’d give it half a chance, since she likes stuff like Continuum, Falling Skies, The 100 and Dark Matter. Don’t even ask me how someone can love Dark Matter, but keep on saying they’re not into Sci-Fi. Whatever, I’ve learned to accept her Idiosyncrasies on this, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t drive me crazy when I want to see a movie like Star Wars with her.
     In regards to the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens movie, I’m of two minds. On the one side, I loved the action and the overall flow and the characters were fresh and interesting. I really liked the character Rey. She’s pretty cool how she’s been surviving on her own on the planet Tatooine. The only thing I didn’t like was how she kept feeling like she had to go back to the planet. Yea they explained the why in the storyline, but even so it didn’t sit right with me. Finn, the Stormtrooper, was another cool character. I liked his story even better and the whole “awaking” made sense enough to complete his character, especially with the whole concept of the Stormtroopers being stolen children raised and drugged into obedience. I guess after the Clone Wars the Empire moved away from the whole cloned soldier thing, not that doing so makes any sense. I mean seriously, why would the Sith Empire move away from cloned Stormtroopers?
     Overall the action in the new movie was fast and the scenes cool, but still there was something lacking. At first I couldn’t put to words what it was. After the movie was finished we sat and talked to a German couple that wanted to discuss the film’s storyline and merits. I was still trying to figure out what didn’t sit right with me about the movie, when something the German guy said struck a chord. He said the movie was very predictable. After thinking about it for a moment, I realized he’d hit the proverbial nail on the head.
     There was no true surprises in the storyline like there’d been in any of the other episodes’ storylines. Yea there was the awakening of Finn, but you knew something was going on and it wasn’t a surprise. Rey flying the ship out into space and being caught by Han and Chewbacca wasn’t a twist. There was a storyline as to why they were there, which worked. The Rathtars in this Han Solo thing were pretty kick ass. Made me think of how an Eye of the Beholder from Dungeon and Dragons would look in real life. Still, it wasn’t a twist in the plot that amounted to anything. Also, Kylo Ren started out the movie super kickass and scary Sith that made Luke Skywalker look like a child playing with the force, but almost immediately turns into a whiny Emo wannabe Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader.
     Overall the storyline itself and the feeling of desperation was very vanilla. The producer was trying to get that New Hope first Star War’s movie feel, while mixing in the emotional intensity of the Return of the Jedi and not really catching either feeling. There just wasn’t that fear of annihilation from the original Star War and the destruction of the Death Star. More importantly there wasn’t any amazing twist that changed the whole storyline that made sense once you saw it and made you say Wow. It was like they were trying to force too much into one story.
     Now don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean I didn’t like the movie. I immensely enjoyed the new Star War’s film. Still the negatives were major enough that it made me think seriously over Destiny’s storyline to make sure I didn’t make the same mistakes. Thankfully so far I am happy with the plot twists and the ending, although I’m still waiting to read through the whole flow of the story to make sure everything is just right.
     Still, being in Germany during Christmas time is not all about Star Wars. Normally it’s about Christmas Markets. Every town in Germany has a Christmas Market and Germans love to go to their local city’s or village’s market throughout the week. Usually vendors come in with these prefab timber shops that they put up to sell their wares, carnival food and warm alcoholic drinks. Usually the drinks are gluhwein, which is a mulled wine served hot. To be honest, it’s not my favorite drink. Thankfully now-a-days they have two other choices: apple juice served warm with a shot of amaretto or a Bailey’s coffee. Being the non-drinking I am, one apple juice with a shot of amaretto is more than enough for me and even better it tastes good.
     The other thing that the Christmas Markets are known for is their carnival food. Different in many way then what is typical for the USA. The core essential food for any Christmas Market is bratwurst on a round bun with mustard. Germans just love their bratwursts, that and their roasted fried almonds. There are some other fun foods like handmade doughnut and a flat bread like pizza covered with cream, bacon bits and onions, which I like best. Lastly there is all of the vendors selling all kinds of hand crafts like any other carnival. All in all fun stuff, except for one thing. They do these markets in the middle of winter, outside and without any heaters to keep you warm. The only thing warm you have is the gluhwein. Frustrating when you’re from Florida. I’ve never been one for standing outside and freezing to death, while eating and drinking. Unfortunately I seem to be the only one of this mindset. Thankfully this year has been unusually warm and my annual visit to the Christmas Markets was actually pretty enjoyable.
     A quick update on my sick boy Kanchen is that the surgery came out okay. Unfortunately there wasn’t much they could do, except trim back the tumor so that his head doesn’t feel like it’s trying to split open from the pressure. The doctors are doing a biopsy, but it’s really only to see which type of cancer we are dealing with. Hopefully the surgery will give him some more time without severe pain. I spent the day watching over him and working on Destiny. Yesterday during the surgery I ended up reading a new book from Elliot Kay called “Life in Shadows” http://www.amazon.com/Life-Shadows-Elliott-Kay-ebook/dp/B018VBMPTI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1450908392&sr=1-1&keywords=elliott+kay The awesome part of the book is that it’s in the Good Intention’s universe, which I absolutely love. I don’t know how Elliot managed to get the book out while working on his published series Poor Man’s Flight, but somehow he managed to squeeze it out. My hat off to your Mr. Kay! If you get a chance check it out and leave a good review. It’s the only way we’ll motivate him to keep the series going.
     For those of you who keep up with my web site, you know I ran into Elliot Kay by accident. A fan of mine who I’ve become friends with directed me to check out the Good Intention Series, which I just loved. Henceforth that lead into reading all of Elliot’s other books and keeping up with his personal story somewhat. It was awesome to hear that he was picked up by a Publishing company for his Poor Man’s Fight series.
     I try to work on my own writing style a lot by checking out Elliot Kay’s writing and John Conroe’s. Both writers have become two of my favorite authors to keep up with. John Conroe’s God Hammer series is a great example of an overpowered hero that still struggles against overwhelming odds. There is so much to learn from both writers style. For now there is not much I can do but keep writing and getting my content out. Only in that way can I be a writer that does this as their primary job. Making it to that point would be a dream come true.  
     Anyway, I wanted to wish everyone a Happy Holidays. I celebrate Christmas, but it’s the Santa Clause and Christmas Tree style of the holiday and the idea of giving flavor. For me, the idea of giving and sharing is very important during this time of year. The way I tend to do this is by baking cookies and sharing them out with people I care about. This year I did eight batches of cookies and five different types: traditional chocolate chips, oatmeal peanut butter chip cranberry, oatmeal banana raisin, oatmeal peanut butter and crushed walnuts and straight peanut butter drop Hershey chocolate kiss cookies. Europeans love the American style cookies and they are a great hit. Best part is I get to share and give in the gift of giving and the ideal of “paying it forward” that I love so much. Christmas Eve will be a Polish style dinner that my wife likes to make. Thankfully I’m off the hook this year for baking a twenty-two pound turkey with all of the sides. We only do that when family is visiting. Everyone always finds it crazy to have such a humongous bird on the table and all of the American style sides makes my wife family think of the American Christmas shows that they see on TV. Fun stuff all around. The best present I have this year is time off with my family and seeing Kanchen feeling much better. He still hurts, but he’s obviously is in less pain after the partial removal of the tumor.
     I hope everyone’s holiday is wonderful and spent with people that you love and cherish.  

     Unfortunately, this is something that I’ve heard going on almost two months now, since one of my black babies have needed several emergency surgeries. It all started in November with a blown ACL for my Kanchen. After his knee surgery there was an abscessed tooth with complications. Just before Christmas we discovered he might have a malignant tumor in his nose that’s eating its way back into his skull, so again we’re trying to do what we can to get him healed up as much as possible and keep his pain in check.
     Even though Kanchen and his brother Rowen are both around nine years old (something like forty in dog years), they will always be my babies plain and simple. They’re both wickedly smart. I always think of them as being around six to eight years old mentally in their human understanding of things. They both traveled with me from Florida to Germany and have been traipsing around Europe with me on my travels, so much so that they even have their own passports.
     For those of you who are pet owners you know how much your dogs can mean to you and your family. For those of you who are not pet owners or who do not have kids, it’s probably something that sounds crazy. For me, they are just as important as any family member. More so in many ways, but that’s coming from someone who’s never have had much in the way of family. I had to laugh because one of my co-workers was talking about the death of his hound being more terrible then that of some of his family members dying. It was a perspective that I could readily understand.
     Anyway, when I found out how sick Kanchen was it kind of knocked me off my feet Tuesday and Wednesday evening. I didn’t get much done in the way of editing Destiny, but slowly I’ve been getting back in the swing of things once again. Tuesday we’ll find out if the tumor is malignant or not, so to keep my mind busy and to not think about everything too much I downloaded Elliot Kay’s books Poor Man’s Fight & Rich Man’s War and read them both. You can find the first book of the series here: http://www.amazon.com/Poor-Mans-Fight-Book-ebook/dp/B00RH1NV4M/ref=sr_1_6?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1450542538&sr=1-6&keywords=elliott+kay  It’s a good series btw and was just what I needed at the time to get my mind off of everything. I really enjoyed the basic training in book one. It brought back memories of my own time in the Army.   
     Tuesday my Christmas vacation starts. I’ll be at the vet for Kanchen’s surgery for most of the day, but I’ll be home editing and sitting with him Tuesday afterwards and probably most of Wednesday as he’s recovering, while finishing up the first run through of Destiny. My first check is mostly the story’s flow. Although I’m checking sentence structure and spelling too on this first run through, it’s not my focus. That will be the second check I run using an app from Grammarly.com. Then I’ll be passing it out to people to help me correct mistakes I’ve missed and let me know what they think of the story. Once that’s finished, I’ll run it by a couple of fans who’ve expressed interest in being beta readers and who really enjoyed the series. After making the corrections that people have found, I’ll release the story.
     The only major pain in the ass thing I need to also finish up is the back cover. Something that seems like it would be simple, but it’s really not. The back cover to your book, if done properly, is quite the work of art. It’s your main advertisement to get people to check out your story. I’ll go into the how more once I’m working on getting Destiny’s finished.
     I’ve included some pictures of Kanchen below for those of you who are interested. I’ll talk more about Christmas in Germany in next week’s post. For now I hope everyone has a great weekend.