Publishing, expansions, new writing, and more
All about what I've been up to, what I'm working on, and what's coming soon
Good evening, my friends.
I hope you enjoyed the story I posted last week that ties in with the Azurite dragons that I talked about the week before. I had a lot of fun writing those. Coming up next week you’ll find a brand new post that will be all the known facts about Garnet Dragons, so I hope you’ll be as excited for that as I was to write it!
For this week, I thought I would do something a little different. Not everyone wants to just live in the world of dragons all the time (though I do!), so today we’ll have a little dose of the real life work that I do as well as some of the things that I’ve been working on.
I’m hoping you’ll be as excited for these developments as I am.
So, first off, let’s talk about the publishing deal I’m currently working toward. I believe I mentioned in my comeback post “Why Dragons” that I went to a local writer’s conference in Tulsa back in October and I ended up pitching a book to an editor for a publisher, a book that’s been sitting in a draw for… oh… about 10 years. It was something that I devoted a lot of time to, but after about my 8th revision of the book, I realized that my writing skills at the time just were not up to the challenge of doing the story justice.
Here’s some artwork I’ve been using for inspiration as I do the work of revising that novel:
But anyhow, feeling like I wasn’t ready for what I was trying to do was why I started working on my fantasy series.
Now, don’t misunderstand. I didn’t pivot to fantasy instead. The story I’m telling in my fantasy books had always been in my head (well, for years, anyhow). I had a number of short stories written, as that was how I originally envisioned the whole story being written. As a series of about 13 short stories (maybe 5,000-10,000 words each).
I’ve talked about the story of how this progressed before. I’m actually a little embarrassed to admit that I used to go into this whole thing in my author bio (yikes!). But let’s dive into it.
The Birth of The Calamity
So let me set the stage. I first started working on this novel way back when I was a wee lad of 29. If you do the math **spends time counting on fingers to make sure it checks out** that places the origin of this story in late 2010/early 2011. I had this idea and I just ran with it. Though I was largely just brainstorming ideas until probably late 2012, when I started actually writing the story. This was the first time I’d written anything longer than 30-40 pages, so it was definitely an experience.
But, probably due to the ADHD, I couldn’t focus all my attention on the novel. So I was working on other things too. I had a plan for a new campaign world for my (then) D&D group, and I wanted to plan a cataclysmic event that was similar (though bigger, nastier, deadlier) to the Cataclysm in Dragonlance.
Hence, The Calamity was born.
Now, this thing began its life as a single page summary of a historical event in the history of this world that I was writing.
Later on down the line, when I started playing with turning that event into a series of fiction stories, I expanded that event into a 7-page short story.
Over time, probably after I wrote the second short story, it occurred to me that I wasn’t really giving any explanations or backstory. There was a lot more that I could tell about this event.
So I expanded it into an approximately 25-page story that I was reasonably proud of. I did some different things cosmologically that I thought were really cool and maybe only just barely explainable, scientifically speaking.
Then I wrote a third short story, all the while doing work on the novel that I mentioned.
Eventually (after I had, I think, 4 stories setting up the series), I largely abandoned the fantasy stories to spend all my spare time on the novel. I ended up writing (by hand, mind you) about 2-1/2 novels’ worth of material. I still have the pages. It’s around 700 pages of handwritten material.
So then I stopped where I was and started typing and revising. Over the course of two years I created at least six or seven revisions of that novel. I talked to people about it. I had people read it and give me their feedback. At one point I even put it up on a public writing site called Inkitt to get public feedback.
By and large, most of the feedback I got for it was very positive. But something was just nagging me about it. Something didn’t feel right. Something about it just wasn’t good enough.
After going through entire text once or twice more, and submitting it to a few agents (form rejections. Shouldn’t have surprised me, really, as at that point I had no idea how to write a good query letter. I was doing little more than just pouring my heart out in emails to try to get someone to read my work). Finally, when I realized I wasn’t really improving it anymore, I was just tinkering, I realized that I just wasn’t ready for it and I needed to do something else to hone my skills.
I think I knew instinctively that editing and revising were not what would add to my writing skills and help me to “level up” as it were. It was writing new material that would help me.
I joined writing groups. I did critiques. I even got involved with an ill-fated indie produced anthology on a concept that I actually helped create before I had a falling out with the group and so I was not part of how that whole thing progressed.
It was then, pretty close to my wits’ end, that it occurred to me that I could go back to the fantasy work and do some more expanding of those ideas to hone my skills.
Origins of the Fall and Rise of The Overlord
And for those who’ve been following me since the beginning of my publishing career (back to the tender year of 2017), you’ll know what the result of that was. I spent a lot of time developing ideas, hitting blocks, devouring books about writing (most notably Stephen King’s “On Writing” and Orson Scott Card’s “How To Write Science Fiction And Fantasy”), and finally breaking through my blocks and figuring out creative solutions to the problems I was encountering.
I remember one day, I was standing in the kitchen, probably cooking or cleaning or something while my (then) wife was in the living room watching a movie or TV or something. I was just thinking through some difficulty about the dragons in my world that had been plaguing me (don’t ask me what the problem was, I honestly don’t remember). And it hit me. Like, literally, the thought slammed me in the forehead so hard I almost fell over. For the first time in my life I understood what the word Epiphany really meant. It sent my thinking about how to do what I wanted to do in a whole other direction and then my writing was off to the races!
And now, as I said, for those who’ve been with me from the beginning, you’ll know that the first thing I ever published was this little novella called (rather on the nose), “The Fall of an Overlord.” These days I’m not particularly proud of that novella. Which is a fair part of why I unpublished it. These days you can still get the audio, due to contracts with Audible, and you might be able to find a used paperback floating around somewhere. But that’s about it.
Anyhow, the point is that set the stage. It was the first half of what started as a one page summary that turned into a 7-page short story that turned into a 25-page short story that had now turned into a 25,000-word novella. And will, in the relatively near future, be turned into the 6th book of an epic series that will likely span at least 250,000-300,000 words.
It’s wild, when I think about it like this in it’s proper perspective.
Which, I suppose, brings us back full circle to what I started this post to talk about. which is…
What I’m working on now
So I’m obviously spending a good deal of my time working on this novel that I’m going to submit to a publisher. I’m very excited about this. I’ve known from the very beginning that I wanted to publish this book traditionally. I just don’t have the ability to get it in front of as many people as a committed publisher could, and I think this is a story that will have enough wide-scale appeal for that factor to have value.
If you’re interested, this book is basically the first book in a series (currently estimated at about 4 books to complete, though, as you probably know, I tend to write long, so it may grow well beyond 4 books!) that is my take on the Biblical Apocalypse. It factors in a lot of my beliefs, as well as some of my speculations, and some things that I really don’t believe in, but will make for great fiction. It’s told largely from the perspective of the man who is destined to become the Antichrist.
While I’ve been working on revising this book, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what I want to do with my fantasy books as we move forward. One of the things that I’ve been lingering on for a number of years is the most common criticism I hear, especially about the first book in my series, Blood of the Dragons, which is that it feels short. Which, I admit, it is. It began it’s life as a 5,000-word short story that I wrote for an anthology. I initially had no plans to expand it. I had no plans to dive any deeper into the backstory behind the Overlord featured in my first two publications, “The Fall of an Overlord” and “Rise of the Overlord.”
But not too long after I wrote the short story, the details of it just kept coming back to me over and over. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was dreaming about it. I was talking about it with family and friends.
I just couldn’t get it out of my head.
And after a while I realized why. There was more to the story. There was way more to tell that I hadn’t explored yet.
So I planned a series of novellas that could go into the details and flesh things out a bit. This is the origin of the novella series, Metal and Stone, that I wrote and published in 2018.
The Story Gets Weird
Okay, so this is where it gets weird. I guess it was probably around 2019/2020 when I realized just how Not Epic a novella series was. I mean, I liked the story. I was proud of what I’d been able to do with it.
But it just. Wasn’t. Enough.
So I worked on expansions. I played with details. I combined books. I extended details. I added characters and subplots. I got each book to novel length… barely.
And then I wrote a fourth book for the series, which crazily turned into this 160,000 word epic.
And that’s when it struck me.
All the books should have this level of depth.
Not expanding just to add words, but to add depth. To add meaning. To add nuance. To really dive deep into this just-a-couple-of-degrees-away-from-reality world that I had built. To add to its history. To flesh it out. To make it feel like a real place with real people and real struggles and real drama and real action. In other words, to make it really epic.
So, friends, that’s what I’ve been doing.
I have a significant amount of this work done already, it’s just not ready to share. There’s a lot more to do yet. And yes, while I do this I have been working on material for the next book, which will be book 5 of Blood of the Dragons, Descent of the Overlords (yes, I’ve been working on this for a long time. There’s a lot of material in my first draft, which is basically me just word-vomiting the story to myself). Speaking of which, he’s a tiny, tantalizing taste of the prologue for anyone who’s interested:
So, that’s where things stand. I’m revising a book for a publisher. I’m working on expansions to the text of the first 4 books of Blood of the Dragons (a significant amount of which has been done, just needs to be refined before I can share it). I’m going to be starting my edit of the first draft of Descent soon. And I’m going to keep producing short stories to go along with these monthly “About Dragons” posts I’ve been doing.
As well as…
Collaborations
I can’t really talk too much about it yet, but there are two collaborations I'm working on that I think are really exciting. One is with the incredible Morgan Alistair Drake of Fathom’s Deep and Beautifully Dead fame. There’s going to be fiction and non-fiction from the two of us, and I’ll have more details on that as we get closer. For now, what I can tell you is that it’s going to involve a crossover between her fantasy world and my Blood of the Dragons world.
And the second one, well, it’s less a collaboration than letting another author play in my world. She’s a fantastic author who’s looking to start a new pen name to dive into fantasy romance and she’s fascinated with the world I’ve created. So I’ve given her permission to use my world (within certain parameters and boundaries) to build a fantasy romance series that could be read in tandem with my books but doesn’t directly involve/affect my story. To keep it “sort of” connected to what I do, we’re currently playing with a series title of “Hearts of Dragons,” and naturally the romances will center on dragons. Sometimes with other dragons and sometimes… not.
Given the subject matter, I think they will remain relatively clean. I really don’t think anyone wants to read about the physical mechanics of dragon mating 😂
But hopefully this will appeal to the subset of my readers who have been asking for dragon romance almost since I started publishing!
Anyhow, I think that’s all from me this week. If you have questions, want me to expand on anything, or just want to chat about any of this (or anything else) feel free to leave a comment on this post.
Thanks so much for reading and for all your support.
God bless, and have a good evening.
I’ve been neglecting to share this lately, so here’s a link to check out my books on Curios or Amazon if you’re interested in buying any of them: