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.
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.
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