2015 Year End Missives

Two blogs in the same month?  Yeah, you can look forward (for better or worse) to more frequent blogging in the next few years.   Call it an early New Year's resolution if you like.

Hey, before I go on, I have to mention how excited I am that the Force (and the Star Wars franchise) have awakened.  I remember sitting through the original Star Wars movie for 3 consecutive showings when it first came out and ended up seeing it a total of 10 times.  I'll stop here, or may end up getting into unintentional spoilers.  But yes, I would probably list Star Wars as one of the top 10 creative influences when I developed the Verdan Chronicles.

Many of you may be going, "Huh, how did a space series influence a sword and sorcery epic?".  Well, think about how magic works in Verdan.  I talk about it as an energy field that certain individuals are born with a talent for harnessing and manipulating.  In that respect, it's not coincidence that it resembles how the force works.  No, I really don't talk about a light side or dark side of magic, but to me magic is agnostic and it's the intentions of the user that make it light (good) or dark (evil).

I guess that whole topic brings up the notion of 'just what were my influences'.  I'm sure it's no surprise that Lord of the Rings is on the list.  I even took a college course that revolved around studying The Fellowship of the Ring.  The single biggest influence probably came from all the comic books I read (mostly Marvel) and then all the Dungeons and Dragon texts and modules I enjoyed playing.  You have to remember that I created the Verdan Chronicles over 35 years ago, so any modern influences didn't exist until later in the series.  The vampires created in Dark Passages were influenced much more by Bram Stoker than by Anne Rice or Joss Whedon (although the second novel wasn't completed until a little over ten years ago, so there may have been a little influence).

Game of Thrones?  That's an obvious one, but I really had no knowledge of the books or TV series until working on the fourth of fifth novel.  I now realize I've digressed into a rambling discourse on my influences, which is not why I started this post. (while tempted to delete and start over, I guess it doesn't hurt to share the above thoughts)

OK, so the reason I'm blogging today is to let you know that Heroes of Bardoom is now available at Lulu.com for purchase.  That went fast.  I've given my approval for it to be part of their Global Distribtution, so it should show up in Amazon, Barnes and Noble and iBooks in the coming weeks.  I'll try to confirm for you when that's official.  I've also officially contracted with Lulu to begin the process to publish Broken Circle, the fourth volume in the series.  I think I mentioned last time being 30% done with the final edit.  You can make that 100%.

I'll save my goals for 2016 for the next blog, but expect me to make more of an effort to get the books published.  I've started my next to last edit of Against All Gods (only about 3% done at this point).  I will be blogging a little more and sharing more tweets, but as I told Lulu, "If I have any available funds, it is going to go into publishing the books, not marketing them."  I think Lulu would like me to spend some money on marketing, but that may have to wait.  It's more important for me to tell the story.  I'll work on sharing it later.

That's it for now.  Have a wonderful New Year's celebration whereever you are!