Well, at least at my house.
As I write this, the service has been down for eight days. Fortunately, the phone part of the service still works so I’ve been able to call (nag?) my provider, CenturyLink.
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This has been my best year.
Since I released my debut novel, Titan Encounter, in 2012, my book sales have grown each year, but this year has been exceptional. With more than a third of the year remaining, my sales have already exceeded those of 2015.
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Tonight the Cascade Awards were presented at the Oregon Christian Writers Conference.
During the awards dinner, I sat with friends Barbara Blakey and Kristie Kandoll. Barbara is a past Cascade Award winner and Kristie was up for the Unpublished Historical Fiction Award tonight along with another friend, Julie McDonald. I really expected one of them to walk away with the award, but the winner was the third finalist, Kathleen Freeman, with her book Children of the Revolution.
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I had a chance to talk with author and editor Ben Wolf on my second day at the Oregon Christian Writers conference.
Ben edited my upcoming novel Seekers of Earth, and will be editing the second book in the series, Recall the Earth.
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I never set out to make book proposals to agents and publishers. I’m a successful indie publisher, what could a traditional publisher do for me? Well, I put that question to Sue Brower, vice president of acquisitions for Gilead Publishing, at the first dinner of the conference.
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This Thursday, August 11th, I’ll be on the Prepping for Tomorrow podcast with bestselling author Bobby Akart.
Bobby is a five-time Amazon Top 50 author of seven number one bestsellers in both fiction (Blackout Series and Boston Brahmin Series) and non-fiction (Prepping for Tomorrow Series) genres.
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When I began writing The Long Way Home I planned on it being a novelette of about 8,000 words.
Sometimes a story has a mind of its own. The completed manuscript turned into a 21,000-word novella. As with Nightmare in Slow Motion, readers of the Strengthen What Remains novels have seen part of the story, and many have asked me to fill in the blanks.
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My friend Debby Lee is changing.
Many writers are shy, solitary, individuals that like nothing more than writing their stories and sending them off to agents and publishers. When I first met Debby I saw that reticence in her.
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Someone once said, “There is no such thing as bad publicity.” I’m not sure that’s true, but in this case, I was very happy to see my name mentioned several times in The Chronicle, my local paper. A friend of mine, Julie McDonald Zander, writes a column for the newspaper and recently called me. Her first questions were when and why I started self-publishing. I told her I started my business in August of 2013, but I prefer the term indie-publishing.
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A friend of mine sent me a picture, and that gave me an idea.
My wife usually gets a worried look when I have ideas, but I think this is a good one. My friend, Jennifer, took a picture of her husband reading my book, Braving the Storms. An idea came to me as I looked at the picture.
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How many people does it take to create a novel?
Recently I watched X-Men Apocalypse with one of my sons. At the end of the action, we waited to see if there were any post-credit scenes (there is). As we watched the endless scroll of credits we discussed how many people were involved in the production of my last novel, Braving the Storms.
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Wattpad and Smashwords are coordinating the promotion of thriller genre books. Smashwords founder, Mark Coker, selected the books and they are featured on Wattpad. Through Many Fires was chosen to be included and will be serialized on Wattpad over the next couple of months.
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My friend and mentor, Joyce Scott is visiting southwest Washington State. Joyce is the author of six books that range in genre from historical fiction to fantasy and murder mysteries. Today she travels with her husband in an RV, but several years ago she lived in Chehalis. Before she moved from the area she and I were in The Inklings critique group.
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A minor earthquake at 8:32 a.m. on Sunday, May 18, 1980, caused the bulging and weakened northside of Mount St. Helens to collapse into the largest landslide ever recorded. The gas, steam, lava, and pulverized rock that it exposed, exploded toward Spirit Lake. Then a column of ash rose 80,000 feet into the air and I witnessed much of it.
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The final book in the Strengthen What Remains series, at least for now. is the 20,000-word novella, The Long Way Home. The story will be released on July 15th, but is available for preorder on Amazon and Smashwords, and will soon be available on Nook and Kobo.
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In a recent blogpost titled, Excited for Friends, I described how my friend Debby Lee contracted through her agent Tamela Hancock Murray of the Steve Laube Agency to write a 20,000 novella for a Barbour Publishing anthology. Barbour needed more writers for the project so Debby suggested our mutual friend Barbara Blakey…
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