Happy End of the Year

This is my last post of 2012. It's been another year full of work (as a delivery driver for O'Reilly Auto Parts-my full-time job & working on my second book of the Andy Brighton and the Dragons of Wyrme trilogy in my spare time). As far as my writing goes I've finished the book & the cover. All I have left to do is finish the map of Wyrme for inside the book. This should take me a few more days I suspect & then I'll be able to turn it into a PDF file & send it off to Amazon.com for publication. During the year I've also had time to play (Wow for one game, WoT for another. World of Tanks the latter, which my brother is addicted to atm. It's an okay game & I can see the attraction-it's basically like battlegrounds wars in WoW but with about 15 tanks vs. 15 other tanks of equal strength. I've seen about 5 or so different maps so far including Mines, Ensk, Province, Prokhorovka, & Malinovka. The game takes getting used to (very different from playing WoW) and there's a lot to learn if you wanna get good at it. Here's the cover of book 2, The Magic of Dragons, which should be on sale on Amazon by mid January (paperback) & late January for Kindle:

Life Goes On

   Yesterday was suppossedly the end of the world, some had said, but we're still here, so I guess that prediction was wrong. I've heard some also say that it was just the end of one age and the beginning of a new age. Well, maybe. Who can say for sure? Unless something remarkable happens that has never occured before we'll never know.

The Ending of the Season

  Well, the years almost over. Christmas is just around the corner and it's getting colder. I've been working the last couple weeks on putting book 2 together & am just over half-way thru formatting and editing. I'd hoped to finish it by Christmas so that I could have it for sale on Amazon by then, but it's looking more like mid January now. The last 3 days I had off work & that helped get several of the chapters finished, but I still have like 8 more to go. (plus doing the cover page graphics & making a 2-page map illustration of the world of Wyrme for inside the book).
   Besides all that I've also been spending my time watching this season's episodes of both Dexter and Homeland. Yesterday's episodes were the last of the season's shows until next year (seasons 7 & 2 respectfully). I'm more into Dexter, but I've gotten into watching Homeland as well & found it to be pretty good--although the story lines are worlds apart the writing style is not that dissimilar--they love to leave the watchers hanging on the edge of a cliff at the end of each show, and/or greatly wondering what will happen next.
   Both shows ended, not unexpectedly, with me wanting to see more. So, just as they did last year around this time, I will be waiting again for them to return next year (I think probably about in September or so. I know it's a long time to wait, but what can we do?) At least they will be showing reruns of this year's episodes next year, probably sometime in the summer, before season 8 & 3 begin for both shows.
   I'll be working on book 3 next year too at any rate, so that should keep me busy. (no title for that one yet)

Full of Turkey & Back to Worky

  Thanksgiving is past and Christmas is well on its way, as well as work. I haven't posted in about three weeks, mainly because I was so busy with my daytime job and with trying to finish my 2nd book of the trilogy. And the rough draft is completed, finally. It ran 21 chapters & is close to I think 120,000 words. Currently book 2 is 21 separate files--I did it that way for convenience sake. To me it's easier to keep track of everything that way when writing a book rather than putting it all together from the beginning. (Each chapter can almost be thought of as little separate stories in a way. Though they don't always make sense in that context-but sometimes they kinda do). At any rate, there's still a great deal to do to finish the book.
Like:
1> Copy all the separate chapters into one file--either word or openoffice, not sure atm. Here it need not be in the exact page format for the finished book yet.
2> Go through each chapter, one by one, reading them multiple times to make sure the story is exactly the way that I want it. Making small tweaks here & there. Editing & re-editing.
3> This done, copy the entire text into another new book file using the formatting that I want (accounting for margins, line spacing, etc.)
4> Create 1st-letter-graphic-icons = The 1st letter of each chapter is represented by a graphical icon that I create. I did this for the 1st paperback book too. You can't see it in Kindle version. I'll probably be able to use some of the ones I already made.
5> Create a map of the world of Wyrme. In book one I made a map of the Orb, which was the world where most of the story took place (it was an alien space vessel crash-landed on the moon). This will go near the beginning of the book.
6> Create a preliminary table of contents. This will also go at the beginning of the book. I can copy the same style used in book one.
7> Create a book cover. I've already created a preliminary cover for book two, but I've decided on some changes that will need to be made to it. This shouldn't take too long.
8> Put everything together: cover, table of contents, map of Wyrme, & the 21 chapters. The page numbers will be at the bottom of the pages again, as they were in book one & are actually not text, but rather graphics files inserted into the pages. They worked out great before & I already have them up through page 356, so that should just about cover me for book two as well.
9> That all done, re-read the book a few times to try & catch any errors. I embarrassingly caught a couple errors left in book one after it was already published (shh don't tell anyone where they are).
10> Hopefully with this finished it will be ready. All that needs to be done is to export it to PDF for submission to Createspace.com & for sale on Amazon.com like I did with book one.

Good Results

  This past weekend I hosted a 2-day free promo for my book Andy Brighton and the Dragons of Wyrme book one The Forsaken Orb, which can be found here:
http://www.amazon.com/Brighton-Dragons-Wyrme-Forsaken-ebook/dp/B009FPRS06/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1352121820&sr=1-1&keywords=wyrme
 From what I've read posted by others my promo had pretty good results. There were close to 1,000 downloads of the Kindle book, and it ranked fairly high in the best-sellers rankings (it got up to about #250 on best-selling free Kindle books, #5 on best-selling fiction,fantasy,epic, and #11 on fiction, adventure). I'll have to wait and see if this results in actual sales.
  If others are interested in results like this I recommend looking at the blog post on June 20, 2012 on Victorine Lieske's blog at: http://victorinewrites.blogspot.com/ for tips on having a succeesful book promo. I also recommend joining The Author Marketing Clug at: http://authormarketingclub.com/ because they have many tools at your disposal for promoting your book & getting the word out on your free promos.
  I want to thank everyone who downloaded my Kindle book & took it as high as it went. I hope they all read it & love it & pass the word along to all their friends. Thanks so much,
James

Giveaway: The Hobbit Pocket Edition

Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who enjoys a comfortable, unambitious life, rarely traveling any farther than his pantry or cellar. But his contentment is disturbed when the wizard Gandalf and a company of dwarves arrive on his doorstep one day to whisk him away on an adventure. They have launched a plot to raid the treasure hoard guarded by Smaug the Magnificent, a large and very dangerous dragon. Bilbo reluctantly joins their quest, unaware that on his journey to the Lonely Mountain he will encounter both a magic ring and a frightening creature known as Gollum.
This charming pocket-sized edition contains the complete unabridged text and features the original cover illustration, painted by J.R.R. Tolkien himself. The perfect gift for little Hobbits everywhere!

 

ENTER THE GIVEAWAY:
http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/bf7d0f0/" rel="nofollow">a Rafflecopter giveaway

 

 

The Nexus Multiverse

  I was watching the History channel today & it had shows on talking about our universe; from how it was created, to the space/time continuum, and other ideas. Seeing this sparked my imagination on the idea of both how our universe was created and on multiple universes & I came up with what I call:
The Nexus Multiverse. In this idea there are a large unknown number of universes circulating around a central point (Nexus), and these universes are created, exist for a time, and then collapse back together over and over ad infinitum. It's like an enormous train of almost infinite size running about on a looping railway through the void, in the center of which is the Nexus, which itself is some sort of super powerful phenomenon. The structure of it all is akin to galaxies or solar systems themselves, usually being spiral in nature (like our own Milky-Way galaxy).

  In the crude picture I created you can see what my general idea is. The 'choke points' at the left & right sides of the universes is where they are created and ended. The universes would all be moving around the Nexus at about the same speed & exist for quite a long time until they began to collapse back inwards. And so at about the same instant all would end. But shortly thereafter a new collection of universes would be created (like a bunch of big bangs happening all at once). What was in one universe moves on through the 'choke point' extremely quickly on into the next area (kind of like sand falling through an hourglass--it moves slowly far away from the 'choke point' but very fast through it). I have no idea of what forces would make such a multiversal structure possible, or even if it would make sense to anyone else, but I thought that it could be one idea for others to ponder. And since we'll probably never really know anyway I guess it's as good an idea as any.