I’ll be doing my best this week to keep the posts rolling, but I’m in the middle of moving from Wiesbaden to Kaiserslautern. I’ll still have possibly up to a month and a half of driving back to Wiesbaden until my organization moves, but even though my commute will be taking an additional two hours out of my day, I will be in a much better place to write. Yet even with everything happening in my personal and work life, I am still working on the story line to complete the last quarter of Destiny, Book Two.

By the way, I’m listening to some Warpaint while I write. I heard this song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bVwOMFrvJI “Love Is To Die” Sunday night when my wife and I were finishing up watching the “True Blood” series. We both really enjoyed the story. A friend I met from writing suggested I check out the “Elf Child” and how they aged for some ideas for Frostbrand and Starfire. Definitely gave me some good ideas I’m still formulating for the story. I’ve been listening to some of Warpaint’s other songs and I’m loving them. Some really good music with hauntingly beautiful melodies.  

I had an interesting review today. Even though it was only a three star review due to my grammar and need for a professional editor, the reviewer was honest enough to say that he still thoroughly enjoyed the story, which is high praise from a reader who finds such errors difficult to cope with. Not that I disagree with the comments on grammar/editing, but I’ve done the best I could with the limited budget I had available for the project. I can only do my best to make this better for Book two. I’d like to address one of the last comments the reader left here, because I think it could be on multiple readers’ minds.

 Why didn’t Startüm Ironwolf transform into a Werewolf for the final battle between him and the Pit Demon? I thought this was a really good question. Although it seems like it would have been a perfect spot for Startüm to transform, I’m saving this for bigger and badder monsters. The “Destroyer” in Book One is actually only a Demon Knight within the echelon of Demon society. In the stories to come there will be more for of a need for this and a reason as Startüm learns to embrace his Werewolf’s Bloodline. This will actually occur on his eighteenth birthday (calculated by Irlendria time). I will say this transition is coming, along with several others, but I wanted to make sure it was at the correct spot within the story arc in an appropriate climatic scene. I needed room for Startüm to grow into his power.

Some people have commented that Startüm is overpowered, but in actuality he is not in comparison to the Paladins that came before him, and he will need everything he has and more for the enemy he will be facing in the future. During the Great War against the Tuonellian’s, the armies of the Alliance of Aurenko were only able to stand against the Hordes attacking their World by the power of the Klavikian Paladins. Only thirteen in number, these holy warriors of Ukko were able to resist the Demonic Evil that the Priestess of Loviatar wielded and keep the Alliance Armies alive to stop the overwhelming forces sent against them. Now with the Klavikains destroyed, Startüm is the only Paladin left to hold back the new Tuonellian invasion that now threatens Irlendria.  

Lastly, the Winter Gaming group has started a little earlier than expected. Although the start date is still November 15th, there are a number of us that have started playing. I’ve actually leveled my first character in years to 15 in preparation. Of course it’s a Paladin =D If you’re playing, you can shoot me a message on Darknovia on Hyjal Server. I’m only play around two days a week, due to the need to get Book Two out, but I’ll be playing for a couple hours in the evenings on Tuesday and Thursday. You can join the online guild here: http://www.audiovideodisco.org/

I had a really great idea for the cover for Destiny, Book Two of the Last Paladin Series, and then I realized that I wouldn’t be making it to the part I’d initially planned to end the second at. I know it’s very common for writers to make covers for their books that have nothing directly to do with the story, but personally I find that extremely annoying. I love to see the vision the writer had of the main character or some important part of the story.

Unfortunately that means the cover I’ve been planning to use for Book Two, even before Book One was finished, now isn’t relevant to the story within its pages, since that part of the story will now be pushed to Book Three. That sucks to such a high degree of suckatude that I cannot even begin to express my annoyance. If you’ve never tried coming up with a cover for a story that captures the essence of the characters/action/story, looks good on the front of a paperback book cover (you have to plan for the smallest possible size), looks exciting/interesting and is overall good enough to encourage writers to pick-up your novel, out of the thousands of other books available, to read the back cover, then you understand how unbelievably difficult this is to do.

Seriously, the goal of any cover is to be good enough eye candy to encourage readers who are into the genre you’re writing about to pick-up your book and check out the back story. It’s your primary form of advertisement before everything else. Your second and third primary forms of advertisement are the back cover snippet of your story and the front inner flap excerpt. These show the readers your writing style and the general concept of your story, hopefully getting them to read the sample Amazon and other websites offer. At this point you’ve sank your hooks into them, metaphorically speaking. You’ve pulled the reader into your world and hopefully they’ve enjoyed the experience and will come back for more.

So back to finding a cover for Destiny, recently I’ve been letting my mind wander as I write the last quarter of Book Two hoping to come up with a new concept that will fit my requirements for the cover. As I’ve talked about before, usually as I write I run through graphic images I’ve pulled out specifically relevant in one way or another to the current story I’m working on. Most of the images are from Deviant Art’s website. I might see if what the artist has in regards to posting his works on other websites or even if I can ask to be allowed to share his work, but first I have to find where I originally pulled the image from.

Anyway, the image is from the Ultramarines: Warhammer 40,000 universe. It’s an action shot from the perspective of the enemy attacking a group of Ultramarines that just rocks. I was thinking I could use the concepts and layout the artist did for this shot for something relevant in my own story. The scene would be in a large cavern. The viewpoint is if you were the attacking enemy charging the group. Picture a large stone statue of a gorgon reaching up to the sky (or cavern ceiling) in the middle of the scene, near the base a large Minotaur warrior in legionnaire armor holding to two enormous double-headed battleaxes shimmering with magical power and is in the process of turning to face an oncoming enemy. Picture ornate chest armor, shredded billowing cloak, armored shin guards over black hooves and elbow high metal gauntlets. Back-to-back with the Minotaur is a modern NATO soldier caught in mid-turn with their rifle swinging around. Maybe she’s a female sergeant with short hair and her helmet off. Lower in front of them are maybe two more modern soldiers, one injured laying on their back with the other shooting back over their shoulder as they try to drag the injured away from the oncoming enemy. Another Minotaur is in the front right of the picture falling backwards with one arm slice off at their upper arm, while the other has a fist spike weapon. Lastly on the left side of the screen are two more Minotaurs rushing up with a large shield in one arm and a fist spike in the other.

I’m still trying to picture the scene. It can’t be too much or it won’t display properly on the cover size allowed on the site. What do you think? Does the scene sound interesting? Would it catch your eye and encourage you pick-up the novel to see what the story is about? Do I need to go back to the drawing board and try for another image?    

For those of you who are interested in writing their own book and the whole process of making corrections and new editions. I thought I would write about my recent experience with revising the printed edition of Flight.

While updating my Ebook is quick and easy, I have been nervous about the process involved in updating the printed edition of the story. I’m sure my hesitance is due to the fact that any changes to the printed edition requiring a writer to go through the whole process of getting a new ISBN number and creating the whole distribution of the book from square one. You would think this would be easy since as the author we have the original file to recreate the original from, but that is not always as easy as it would seem to be.

The Ebook and the Printed book are two different files and the formatting, at least for Amazon, responds differently to the template Amazon offers. Not to mention, each web site that you work with seems to require a different template, depending on which way you decide to publish.

Initially I self-published my book on Amazon, which is a double process requiring two separate templates. You don’t realize this until you finish your CreateSpace upload and then suddenly you’re forwarded to Kindle Direct Publishing and things don’t transfer correctly. By the time you finish you now have to finished template that you are required to use. Unfortunately, both of these templates happen to not be compatible with websites such as Smashwords or LuLu and I’m sure many other self-publishing web sites. On a side note, amazingly enough if you go from the Smashwords direction, their templates seem to be compatible across the board, a nice tidbit of information to know ahead of time.

You might ask why I just didn’t publish with Smashwords and push everything out to the various websites that way. First off, I didn’t know about Smashwords at first. Second, I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with how Amazon promotes third party website books. Lastly, most of my sales come from Amazon, so I would rather do whatever is needed to make sure I don’t interfere with how Amazon treats my works. Maybe they do nothing differently, but there are enough strange things that happen within the Indie Writer world in comparison to the professionally published writers that I don’t want any unpleasant surprises. Do a quick search on “Self Published Writers” & “reviews disappearing” and see what I mean. Publishers have paid reviews that review their writer’s books, but it’s very difficult to get reviews on Indie Writer’s books in the same way. Also, if I moved completely to Smashwords I would lose my current sales ranking, which typically shits in a decent spot.

On Amazon, you have to publish a physical book before you are allowed to publish an ebook. The print ready graphics for your physical book is not the same requirements for your ebook or your audio book, if you decide to go that route. So, by the time you get your first Amazon book published you are sitting with a minimum of two different templates and two to three print ready covers. Also, if you joined the Amazon Writer’s Contest, you also have yet another template, so now you’re up to three book templates and three covers … not to mention all of the attempts when you were discovering exactly what size of book you needed to publish your print novel.

The good thing is that if you end up doing a template for Smashwords or LuLu or whatever, you still have only three templates, since you can now use your Smashword template for Amazon. This might not sound like much, but it typically turns out to be more than you realize. I’m pretty organized, but even I have folders and folders worth of templates of previous versions of the word template for my novel and different graphic covers in various formats and designs.

If you are making emergency changes to your ebook because you’ve had some person blast you in a review about a mistake you missed. Your ebook’s template is probably in pretty good shape, but unless you are extremely disciplined I imagine your printed template is probably not in as good of shape. Using myself as an example, I’m probably on my eight editions of my ebook and my first edition for the printed book.

There are so many changes that it was just easier to start from my printed edition from scratch. Unfortunately, I had major issues with using my Smashword template. It was so bad that I ended up spending four hours to get everything reformatted. Annoying, but my wife wants to be able to give a couple copies of my book to some of her family and friends. She would have just taken the first edition, but I was too embarrassed for that, so hence a night of whacking my print edition into shape.

The only additional advice I would give is to make sure you keep all of your Author, edition and novel names completely the same so that the system picks up your new edition properly. If not you will need to work with Amazon’s Help Desk to get everything linked properly, which is a pain in the butt.

Hope my experiences with this helps those of you doing this for the first time.   

The story for Book Two of the Last Paladin Series carries on the ongoing struggle of Startüm against his people’s ancient enemy. There is no place left to hide, the Tuonellians now know about Earth and the situation on Irlendria is quickly deteriorating as the enemy’s long term plans turns the Alliance of Aurenko against itself. While a large portion of the story focuses on the growing evil that once again threatens to destroy the races of Irlendria, the story on Earth proceeds further as Humanity races to discover more about the enemy that invaded their world.  

I know that this is a VERY brief rundown of the general story arc for Book Two, but I felt that it was necessary to discuss the various titles I have been going through in my head. The lists of my first choices are below:

Destiny

Revelation

Descent

Discovery

Exposure

For now Destiny is at the top of the list, although Revelation and Descent are close runner ups. Destiny fits many of the characteristics of the overall storyline, and has the added benefit of being a highly searched name due to the new Destiny MMO that Microsoft recently released. Although that was not part of my initial thoughts when I was choosing the name, but after a couple friends of mine pointed out this additional benefit. It has made Destiny my planned name for Book Two for all of these reasons. Descent would have also been a preferred title in my mind. I’m partial to Descent due to an old video game that had the same name. Descent was my first love within the realm of first person shooters. Also, it has the added benefit of fitting the story’s theme in many ways, unfortunately out of all of the friends I run things like this by, the title was not well received : / Although, I am still interested in having discussions on possible names with anyone who is interested =D Feel free to comment or drop me an email.

For those of you who haven’t noticed, I prefer one word titles for books. Partly this is because I really loved how R.A. Salvatore did his naming conventions for his Dark Elf Series. Titles such as Homeland, Exile and Sojourn are so powerful and simple. I know there are many other writers who have done this with good results, but since the Dark Elf Trilogy is such a powerful story. I’ve been greatly influenced by his writing and the choice of titles in my own books.   

I'm trying to get back to doing two updates a week again on the blog. Preferably I would like to get back to three updates a week, but between work, family, writing and life I’m not sure if that’s possible. But it’s always good to have goals, right =D

Here are two characters that I’ve had a lot of fun with and have pictured from the very beginning of the story. I hope you like the brief history of the Elven Races on Irlendria that comes with them: 


On Irlendria there are three distinctive groups of Elves that make up the Elven Kingdom that resides within the Great Forest. Although they all live the same general domain, they live separately from one another, internally dividing themselves into Clans: Gray Elves, Forest Elves and Wild Elves. Albeit when referring to themselves, most Gray Elves consider themselves High Elves, a title of pride left over from the Great War. Because it was Daeron Fortress, the Gray Elf ancient home, that stopped the invaders when the Tuonellians sent their hordes to destroy the Elven Race over forty-seven years ago. 

While both Gray and Forest Elves are xenophobic to the other races of Irlendria in the extreme, they respect one another and work closely together due to their mutually shared philosophical perspectives on the evolution of the Elven Race. Unfortunately, this commensal relationship does not extend to the Wild Elf Clan. While the Gray and Forest Elves did work closely with the Klavikians at the onset of the War and even altered their metaphysical beliefs to stand against the Tuonellians, the Wild Elves have never left the core values that their race was founded upon. This adherence to the old ways greatly weakened the Wild Elf Clan’s effectiveness during the Great War and caused a rift between them and the other Clans.   

This brief history of the Elven people I thought was somewhat necessary to explain my next characters from Book Two, Enelya Tasartir and her soulmate Argus. Enelya is a Spirit Shaman from the Wild Elf Clan. She has an animal companion named Argus, which she calls her soulmate due to the spirit-link they share. While the spirit-link enhances them both, their lives are linked together from this bond. If one dies, so then does the other.

Argus is from a race known as the Wenci, which are apex predators within the Great Forest. The Wenci families are formed into Packs that hunt and live together in small communities with the Wild Elves. Although their bodies are long and slender with short legs, they are large enough to act as temporary mounts for their Elven Companions. The Wenci naturally have incredible dexterity and are armed with long claws and sharp fangs with hides that are protected by thick fur coats that combine to make them tough aggressive fighters.  

For any of you that are interested, my I will be participating in a “Winter Gaming Group” that starts up November 2nd and goes on basically until the weather is decent here in Germany. A Teamspeak 3 server is being stood up for when the guild get up to the point of raiding.

Here is the official email I received about the group:

“First off, http://www.audiovideodisco.org

Please register, I'm trying to post information to the forums on a regular basis. It's also a great way to get information from the experienced WoW folks.  Any questions you have you can post in the forums and I'll try to answer.

Secondly, Teamspeak 3... we have it.  This means you need to be able to at least log in.  Nothing is mandatory with it, but it's a very useful tool if you are a new player and have questions.  Once we hit actual raiding content this will be mandatory.

Thirdly, nothing is stopping anyone from starting up right now!  Guild invites are available right now.  We just don't have anything on the event calendar until November.  If you want to try to put together a higher level group feel free!

Lastly, November starts our Winter Gaming Group events.  You need to do the following before November 2nd.  This group is more for brand new WoW players than anything else.  Helping them level up, learn the basics of the game to hopefully become entry level raiders for the guild later on.


1) Register on the website (I'll get you the correct permissions, just message me through the website or post in the forums)

2) Sign up for the events you will be at via the Events link!

3) Have a level 15 character ready to go on November 2nd!  Play what you want and will enjoy!

4) Make sure you have Teamspeak 3 downloaded and you can connect to the server!

Second Lastly, feel free to forward the guild information to anyone interested.  The more the merrier!  Just send them to the website for more information!”

For those of you who don’t know my history, I was a hardcore gamer for a number of years. I loved all genres … first person shooters, strategy, MMO’s, etc. It was a huge part of my life and still is very important to me in many ways, even though I don’t normally play much now-a-days. Partly the reason I don’t play like I used to was that after being a Guild Leader of an End Game Raiding Guild for so many years. The constant responsibility sapped my love of MMO’s in general. Another part of the reason was that I had a long-term relationship end with my girlfriend who was my gaming partner, which made many of the gaming relationships I had painful to continue holding onto at the time. Also switching over to extreme sports and traveling around the world kind of threw a major kink into having any time to game too.

This doesn’t mean I won’t be writing regularly, but I thought it might be kind of fun to take two days a week to play a couple hours with some co-workers, friends and maybe some fans. I’m just warning everyone, I will be playing at some odd times due to my Central European time zone in comparison to people in Australia, Canada and the United States, but at the same time I would love to have some time to team up and hang out online for those of you that are interested.

Feel welcomed to drop me an email if you’re interested or just sign up on the Guild’s forums

Okay, well maybe not such a “quick update”, but I can’t help it once I start writing!

It’s been a crazy week at work and at home, between the two I’ve missed my normal blog posts. I decided to get a quick post out before I went to the movies to see Lucy. For those of you who haven’t seen the trailer, it’s here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVt32qoyhi0 I hope it’s as freaking awesome as it looks!

Wednesday nights are our movie nights at the Taunus Theater. You can find it here: http://www.shopmyexchange.com/ReelTimeTheatres/Movies-Wiesbaden.htm Although not much of a selection, it’s still a nice theater for those of us serving overseas. The next two movies I’m waiting for are Guardians of the Galaxy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89q_HH-3ghk and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZZ0PnDZdZk

Hey don’t judge, I know I’m a geek =D

I’m still trying to decide on a title for Book Two. Hopefully my next post will have the top four Titles that I’m struggling to decide on. I’m hoping I can get a vote as to what people like best and then decide based on everyone’s feedback.

I will also be posting my experience on the process of getting a new edition of Flight’s printed edition up on Amazon. Although I update the Ebook whenever I hear of an issue someone found within its pages, I haven’t updated the printed edition. My wife just had a friend want to give her husband a copy for his birthday and I was horrified when I’d realized I hadn’t updated that version yet.

Until now updating the printed version hasn’t been an issue. People typically buy Ebooks or Audio books, but rarely does someone actually buy the printed edition, which is why I’ve been somewhat lackadaisical on getting it corrected. Now if I had my books in bookstores across the world and in the airport this would have been a priority, but since I’m and Indie Writer it hasn’t been top on my list. Well now my wife has properly motivated me to update the printed edition too.

My daughter just had her eighteenth birthday party this last Monday. Although this was the small party for her girlfriends since it was a school night, the girls danced and sang until 0500 in the morning. I think I passed out sometime around 0230 from exhaustion … not drinking. It was entertaining to hear everyone singing and dancing though.

I’ve also been working with my daughter on learning to drive. She’s doing awesome with the learning the manual and I’m really proud of her. I think it’s always smart to be able to drive any car, no matter if Google is trying to make knowing how to drive obsolete =D You never know when you’ll be stuck somewhere trying to escape a Tyrannosaurus Rex and the only vehicle available is some manual transmission jeep. Sigh, my daughter rolls her eyes at that, but I know some of you know what I mean.

I had a fan named Nic ask me when I’m planning on having Book Two out, and I’ll post what I told him. If RL allows me to finish Book Two in 2014, then I’ll have it out this year, but if not then I’m planning on the first quarter of 2015. While Flight was 88,040 in length, I’ve already written over 65,000 words of Book Two. Although that sounds like a lot, Book Two is turning out to be a lot bigger story than I’d originally planned. I know where I want the story to end at, but as I’m writing the story I’m discovering there is a lot more story then I’d realized and I have no desire to skip over the details. I’m doing my best to get it out as soon as possible though and I normally write a little every night … except on the weekends. My wife has nixed any writing on the weekends after Book One was released. 

Eitherway, Book Two is turning out awesome. I really love how the story is turning out and I hope everyone who reads it feels the same!

I’ve said this Series will have four books, although that doesn’t mean the story is over. I already have a second series planned that picks up where The Last Paladin Series stops. The planned name of the next Series will be “The Demon Wars”. I had originally thought this was a spoiler … and maybe it is. Once you’ve read Book Two it will make more sense ^^

Also, I have two prequels planned for the Series. One will be the stories of the Paladin Ilmarinen Ironwolf and his Werewolf wife Novastar Ironwolf (Startüm’s parents), which will cover the Tuonellian invasion up to their death. The other Series will cover Startüm’s life on Earth.  

After writing back to Nic I just decided I had to share the information with everyone who checks out my blog. Again, thanks for letting me know how much you liked the story Nic. It made my day!

Anyway, I think that’s enough of an update for now. I’m going to try to get a little bit of writing in before heading out to the movies.

Larissa Evans is a thirty-two years old Archaeology. She holds a Ph.D. in Archaeology, Anthropology and Linguistics and has spent the majority of her life studying cultural, physical and linguistic anthropology, focusing specifically on ancient and classical civilizations of the Mediterranean. Although she is recognized as a world renowned Archaeology and Linguist, her height and looks has made it nearly impossible for her to be taken seriously among her peers within the male dominated field of Archaeology.

While her model height of one point eighty-seven meters (6' 2"), small waist and large chest has time and again caused her considerable problems throughout her professional career, her sharp mind and extensive knowledge of ancient civilizations has allowed her to excel within field archaeology. At the age of twenty-six she turned down a Professorship of Classical Archaeology at Oxford University, once she learned that Jowettney and Newtonian were the current electors. Larissa adamantly refuses to confine archaeology to the classics, which has put her at odds with her academic peers. Instead she accepted a position as the Keeper of the Ashmoloean Museum.

Her Father, Sir Arthur John Evans, was her motivation for going into the field of archaeology. His death when she was fourteen years old left a hole in her life. Still, even in death her Father’s many professional connections and her in-depth knowledge of ancient civilization has enabled her to succeed.

For those of you interested the audio book for Flight, it can be found
here: http://www.amazon.com/Flight-The-Last-Paladin-Series/dp/B00LIAUVCI/ref=tmm_aud_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1404911218&sr=8-1 
I still need to see if I’m allowed to give out a copy for Christian who
won the Goodreads Book Giveaway contest. I promise I’ll look into that. 
 
Just so that you know, the audio book’s price is set by Amazon since I went with their production process, so it costs as much as any audio book does. For those of you who like audio books, I will say it's definitely worth the price. Alex Edward Trefethen did an unbelievable job with the story.

I hope the audio version does as well as the Ebook, so that Alex will be open to doing the second book in the series. Since honestly I can’t imagine hearing the story with anyone else’s voice.

It seems like life just doesn’t stop at times. I’ve been given the ancient Chinese curse – “May you live in interesting times”. Not that being busy and having lots of things happening is curse, but sometimes I wish events would slow down and give me enough time to recover in-between.

Over the last few weeks I’ve had friends shipping out, my daughter’s return from her exchange program, a wedding in Germany, a wedding in Poland, my audio book release, wife’s nephew’s visit, teaching my daughter how to drive and my first invite into an author meet-in-greet. All while working my normal full time job, preparing for an up and coming move for work, dealing with some personal emergencies that popped up during this same time, while doing my best to squeeze in whatever time leftover to write and work on the plot line of Book Two of the Last Paladin Series. Henceforth the reason I haven’t been to bed before 0200 hours in weeks.

Luckily during my drives heading into work and returning back home on the weekends I get a couple hours to figure out scenes in my head.

Somehow I’ve fit everything into my schedule. This week things are finally getting back somewhat to normal (if you discount Fourth of July weekend), but last night everything finally caught up to me and came down with a cold. A good excuse as any to go to bed at a reasonable time, like midnight =D 

It’s amazing how much better you feel after a decent night’s sleep.

Couple highlights from the Super Strength Speed Reading Event. I met several Amazing writers and interviewers. Most notably were Will Massa, Tina Tame, Starla Huchton and Drew Hayes. Don’t get me wrong, the other authors (P.S. Power, Michael G. Thomas Joshua Guess, March McCarron & Cheree Alsop just to name a few) from the Event are awesome too and I bought all of their books, but for this post I want to talk about the first set.

First off Will Massa is just a great guy and I loved his titles. His Gargoyle Knight and Fear the Light series look awesome. I’ve bought both. The cover Will did on his Gargoyle Knight Series is incredible and I think we both hit it off due to the stories we both like to write. Either way, I had a great time talking with him during the event and look forward to getting to know him better in the future.

Starla Huchton is just an amazing woman. She is savvy and smart about promoting herself and an awesome person with Super Geek Cred in my book. There is a lot any writer could learn just watching how she works. I picked up a copy of her Evolution: ANGEL Series because it sounds like a great story.  

Drew Hayes was a just an amazing wealth of information and a super nice guy. He had some great information in regards to BoolBub & Bookgorilla, The Pen & Cape Society for authors and some incredible creative ideas for Web Series. Over the next several weeks I’m going to have to dig into everything he was talking about, but like I said, a great guy who has no problems sharing from his experiences, which I have nothing but respect for the man.

I’ve put Tina Tame in here due to Fang Tastic and a whole area of Dark Urban (Erotic-Romance) novels I’d never knew about. She invited me to an Event where I ran into some of Isobelle Cate’s work. Let’s just say it’s the perfect read to work on my up and coming romance scenes in my Series. Just plain hot. Tina is super cool and I had a great time chatting with her. Not to mention, she also speaks German of all things. All in all a smart, sexy and amazing woman with some great taste in graphics, so if you get a chance check her out on facebook at Tina Tame or Fang Tastic.

Lastly, I met a writer named Michael G. Thomas and fell in love with his cover for Legions of Orion. I immediately bought his book for two reasons. First, any book with a cover like that is going to grab my attention, and so far I’ve been enjoying the read. I can’t wait to get to the space battle scenes. Second, it partly scared me that the cover looked eerily similar to a Sci-Fi story that’s been bouncing around in my head. Luckily for me the story is different enough that when I write my own it won’t be in conflict with his story line, but when I first saw the cover I truly freaked.  

There were a lot of other incredible people I had a chance to meet. Although everyone was cool and I really enjoyed Geeking Out, I spent most of the Event talking with Kelsea Schafer while trying to keep up the chaos. Who, by the way, is a pretty interesting woman and a fan of Urban Fantasy type novels.

I still need to finish writing up my documentary of the self-publishing processes. Although I have a lot of great information already listed about the process, there are still some important points I’d like to finish up for those writers looking to self-publish their own books.

In the days to come, I will be discussing my exploration into some of the great groups and tools that Drew Hayes gave me information about. Also I want to discuss some of the characters in Book Two.

An Indie Writer’s life is one of striving for balance while writing.