So, it’s been a few years since I’ve published (and written) a new novel. The last book was The Deck Const: Shadows & Rumors, which was written nearly eight years ago. So, you may be wondering why there’s been nothing since.
To put it simply, I haven’t been all that well for the last decade. Last year, things kind of went right into the gutter, and they’re not really getting up from there. None of this is depression stuff. This is all health-related, and to put it simply, it sucks.
The few projects I’m working on right now I intend to get back to work on soon, but not being healthy has created its own process of writer’s block. Of the projects I’m working on, here’s a sample of what’s in the works:
1991. A book about the last gasp of the Soviet Union during the August Coup in 1991. The story is told in today’s time by an historian who is following up a lead given to him by his colleague’s mother who happens to be one of the philanthropists of the university where he works. As he begins to uncover secrets best left unraveled, he awakens some very dangerous people who don’t take kindly to outsiders asking questions that might lead to some very serious answers.
An Elvis Song on the Jukebox. The book takes place in the mid-1990s and involves a gay bashing incident that takes place at a San Francisco bar. Now, decades have passed, and the main characters involved in this incident begin to come to terms with what happened during that horrific incident.
A Simple Matter of Time. A story involving time travel, skewed history and the origin of good and evil. The only problem with this story is that somewhere, somehow, I lost the outline for this story, and it was so detailed that putting it back together has been so extremely difficult.
There are a lot of writers out there who haven’t been that successful. Yet, they keep on plugging away, convinced that one day it’s all going to work out for them. I’m kind of in that same boat, but unlike the others who never had their chance, my chance came several times…and sort of fizzled away. Let me explain:
Years back, I was shopping my first book. I was in my early twenties, and I had written it while in the Army. It was a really good book called INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY. And it was published. Not to great fanfare, but it was published.
So, I started shopping my second novel, LOSER (which would eventually become LEADER OF THE LOSERS). Nothing. Not even a whimper from anyone wanting to sell it. One editor pointed out that perhaps it was the depressing title. Publishers didn’t want to publish books with such a negative title. So, it sat there, forever.
Then I wrote my next novel, the infamous The Armageddon Project, which was a story that took place during the Cold War. Keep in mind, it was written during the Cold War. But at the time, the Cold War was ending, so I quickly rewrote it to match the new events taking place in the world (much of the action takes place in East Germany and Western Russia). And then those regions kept changing, so I kept rewriting it. At some point, the title changed to match the main character (known as “the Unicorn”), so the title became TO TOUCH THE UNICORN. And then a publisher told me that the title was too much like a fantasy novel, but the novel was corporate/government espionage. He also said that it was hard to figure out what exactly the main character’s job was. At the time, I had created the concept of an economic hit man, but the concept was completely unknown in the 1990s, so it just couldn’t catch on. Years later, after Germany and Russia have settled into the republics they are, the story changed massively and is now being rewritten for about the 90th time, and it now takes place in 1991 during the August coup in the former Soviet Union. It’s now called 72 HOURS IN AUGUST, but it’s on the back burner for a rewrite.
Anyway, somewhere around this time, I was starting to make a name for myself as a writer. I had been writing tons of short stories and they were published in a bunch of different magazines. At first, they were published in mostly literary magazines, but then the larger presses started picking them up, and several prominent magazine editors started recognizing my name from previous things I had written. Things were kind of going pretty nice for me back then.
And then one of my novels was bought for publishing by a prestigious book publisher. And then I got an agent who once represented one of the greatest science fiction writers in modern times before he passed away. All was looking great.
And then the publishing company folded. Overnight. Without a single warning.
My agent got into an accident and severely injured her head. She dropped out of the business for a while to recover, and when she did, she seriously didn’t even remember who I was. I gave up trying to re-establish our working relationship.
And then the Internet exploded. Amazon became the biggest thing in independent writing, and the industry changed overnight. If you weren’t already established, you were basically an unknown, and if you were an unknown, you had to now start building a social following in order to even sell a single book. Not being really good at social networking (just has never been my thing), my career kind of just fizzled and died. Sure, I sell a few books here and there, but I might sell more just standing on the corner and asking people to give me a buck for a hand written copy.
Fast-forward to today, and I’m the middle of writing an epic novel series that I suspect might not be read by more people than this blog post. I say this with trepidation because of the amount of time invested in this project. I’ve already spent seven years researching this thing, and I’m about to start putting actual physical work into writing it. Keep in mind that my last two projects took me each half a decade to produce, and my stuffed animals get more attention when they’re pulled over for drunk driving. My previous project took me six years to complete the first book (of a three book project). The research involved was extensive. It was called The Deck Const. Doesn’t matter what it was about because no one’s going to read it any way.
The project before that is probably the one piece of work of which I am most proud. When people talk about a crown achievement in one’s life, that book would probably be mine. It is a humorous novel that tells the story of the last hero of Troy who comes home to found a little civilization called America. It’s called THE AMERIAD, and it was so much work, and it involved so much research. But to someone reading it, one gets the sense that it’s a simple, fun story that seems very familiar. It’s told in Iliad/Odyssey format, and the main character is actually the translator who has interpreted this found epic in the only way the worst translator could possibly ever do. The book was so hard to write, especially in a way that made it feels so natural.
That’s the dilemma I find myself in as I finish up the last stages of research to begin constructing my Arthurian epic. And part of me wonders if my time might better be spent playing a video game instead.
Well, the first semester at the new college in Texas is finally coming to a close, and let’s just say that things haven’t been all that great, but at the same time, I’m still here, and hopefully things will start to improve a bit. It’s honestly a struggle to teach at a college/university where students aren’t all that interested in doing the work, the institution isn’t all that interested in supporting its faculty and staff, and there’s just not a whole lot of money to pay debts that were actually promised.
Yeah, it’s been a bit of a struggle. We’re all being put on furlough, which means we’ll be losing 20 percent of our pay next semester, and it just makes it really difficult to want to continue coming to a place where you feel like you’re not really respected for the kind of work that you do. Oh well.
As for my writing projects, The Deck Const: Shadows & Rumors was published last month, so it’s now available on most e-readers and on paperback through Amazon.com. I was pretty happy with it.
My next project is a series of three books all involving the King Arthur legend. For years, I’ve been doing the background research for this novel, and now I’m finally ready to start putting it onto paper. The working title has been Return to Camelot, but I can’t promise that’s the name it’s going to end up having.
Not much else going on. The Christmas season is about to come upon us, so I’m hoping that means a few weeks of rest and relaxation. But, of course, I intend to write during that time, so we all know how that whole rest thing goes under such circumstances.
I finally decided I needed to take my web site into the 21st century, and it definitely needed a push to illustrate that this is the site of a writer, not just a random web site that someone uses to make blog posts every now and then. One of the things I was aching to do was to build a page where you could find all of my currently released novels. There are officially 9 of them released, which includes:
Innocent Until Proven Guilty
Leader of the Losers
Thompson’s Bounty: A Ship Out of Time
The Ameriad: The Untold Founding of America By the Survivors of Troy
The Teddy Bear Conspiracy
Destiny
Deadly Deceptions
Darkened Passages
Absent Without Leave
All of the novels I have written under other names, I have decided not to include in my listing. I’m basically trying to have those names make a success on their own, so we’ll see how they do without the star power of my own name to propel them forward. Yeah, that’s a joke, but anyhoo.
Some of the nice features I was able to implement with the new site included a lot better access to social networking areas that I’m tied to. Before, it was just kind of random. Now, the icons for the specific sites are at the top of the page, which means being a lot easier to link that way.
The other feature that is kind of nice is that the menu bar at the top also allows me to emphasize some of my works in progress. I’ve been wanting to share the map for Reagul for quite some time, and this offers just the opportunity to do that. I’ll be including a lot more information on that property and the Deck Const in the near future. I’m really excited about both story lines, and I hope others are, too, especially when they start to see some of the stuff that’s going to be coming out of those lines.
It took me nearly the entire day (aside from teaching) to get this all configured. There’s still more work to do, but at least it’s finally on a good footing for future innovations.
I think I mentioned that I decided to quit my job a few weeks ago. I put in my notice, and I have a little over two weeks left. A couple of days, I almost quit on the same day I was working, but I’ve perservered, and my last date of work will be December 24th, Christmas Eve. There’s no significance to that day, but that will be my last day of work.
So far, no other jobs have lined themselves up for me. And I’m anticipating that it’s probably not going to happen either. This means I really need to make it as a writer, or I’m going to starve to death. Simple as that. I won’t even get unemployment benefits. I kind of screwed myself on this one, but I’m trying to move forward with a positive disposition, no matter how many dark thoughts keep overwhelming me about this decision and its process as its being carried out.
Monday, I have a release for one of my new novels, The Teddy Bear Conspiracy.
I ran a 2 month contest on Goodreads for this book, and nearly 600 requested a copy of it. I am giving away 10 copies. There’s still a few more days left in the contest, but I’ve given up hyping the contest. Check one of the older posts, or just go to Goodreads if you’re interested in that. I also listed a giveaway of The Ameriad through Library Thing, which I did this morning, and it has about a month before it will complete its giveaway process. I don’t have an immediate link to that one, but you can definitely find it if you just go to Library Thing’s site and search for it under giveaways.
But anxiety is definitely beginning to emerge for me because so far this month, I haven’t sold a single book on Amazon. I’ve sold a few through Barnes & Noble and Kobo, but Amazon, which is usually the one that does the bulk of the selling, has been dead cold for me this month so far. That is not a comforting feeling. Remember what I was saying about starving? Hunger pains are already starting to emerge, and I’m not even at the no food stage yet.
After the Teddy Bear Conspiracy goes live, my next project involves a romance series I’m writing with a female writing friend of mine, and then I’ll be heading for a “sometime in January” release of the first book of the Tales of Reagul series, A Season of Kings. Actually, it’s not really the first book, as Destiny was the first book, but I did something a little strange with this series that not too many other writers do with a series. The first book, Destiny, starts 3000 years after the Tales of Reagul series begins, which kind of makes it an interesting universe for someone following the saga. To explain:
During the period of the Roman Empire, a small group of villages were snatched up by an alien civilization and placed onto a planet called Reagul, where an experiment was being conducted to see how civilizations handle in different environments (the original Rome being the control group, and Reagul being the experiment group). One of the citizens of the new Reagul is a young man who eventually learns all of the alien technology (to be the shepherd of this planet) and immediately after he learns everything, the aliens are called back to their home system to fight a war that is obliterating their people. The young man becomes the prominent wizard of Reagul, as everyone sees his technology as magic, and with such knowledge, it practically is. This begins the Tales of Reagul. 3000 years later, which is about 1000 years in our future, the human empire has spread across the stars, and a coloony comes under attack from the empire. A survivor of the assault leads a mission to destroy the empire by killing the emperor, which brings her to the planet Reagul, where it is discovered that her abilities (the reason she was chosen for the mission) rival those of the wizards of Reagul, indicating a tie between her planet and the strange alien race that contacted them years before (obviously being the same aliens who started the experiment with Reagul in the first place). That loater story is Destiny.
As you can see, it’s kind of complicated, but it’s a great, fun story. The first of that story (aside from Destiny) is slated for release in January.
The next project is a sequel to Thompson’s Bounty: A Ship Out of Time, my time travel adventure involving pirates and the Coast Guard. The new adventure will take Thompson and his crew into the Greek and Roman eras. That should be a lot of fun to write (and hopefully, read). People have been asking for a sequel to this novel for years now, so I finally started plotting it out.
The other distant project is my Deck Const series, which received a bit of fame from a series of short stories that I published back in the 1990s in some of the pulp magazines of that time. They were often referred to as The Soldier stories, and there was always a hint of something called The Deck Const in every one of them. I’ve finally finished the first draft of three novels that I’m reworkiing for publication. It’s a dystopian suspense series of the last soldier who is trying to rebuild civilization while on the quest to find a mysterious talisman only known as The Deck Const.
That’s kind of an update for now. Not sure if anyone even reads these updates any more, but just in case this is being read by soldiers from the future who are in search of the elusive Deck Const, let this be your clue that it exists and perhaps you are one step closer to finding it and rebuilding civilization again. Until then, sorry life kind of sucks for you right now, but dystopian societies can be that way.
