Category: The Soulbond and the Sling

Back from the Great White North

We just got back yesterday from our second family road trip this summer, this time to Alberta for a family reunion. My wife’s grandmother passed away in the winter, and it wasn’t a good time for us all to get together (not to mention that we didn’t have passports for the kids yet), so we scheduled a family event for the summer to get together and remember her.

I’ve been to Canada before, but only to Quebec. This was my first time driving through Alberta. It was interesting. About as similar as you can get to the United States while still being a foreign country. Alberta itself feels kind of like a cross between Nebraska and Pennsylvania, with Hutterites instead of Amish, and more rapeseed (for canola oil) and alfalfa than corn and soy. This was especially true up in the northern part of the province where we were going, where there were also lots of little lakes, and all of the trees were high-altitude trees (aspen and pine, mostly). Even though it was summer, the air was pleasantly cool, which makes me wonder what the winters are like. Probably brutal.

At the reunion itself, we had lots of food and outdoor games. Had a big campfire both days and roasted marshmallows for s’mores, which the kids really enjoyed. There was also a LOT of pie, including saskatoon pie, which was a new thing for me. Saskatoon berries are kind of like blueberries, except tart, and they grow in large bushes a little like currants. We picked our own saskatoons for the pies.

Overall, it was a very good trip. About sixteen hours of driving, split across two days, so that wasn’t too bad. There were a couple of times where we had to change poopy diapers on the side of the road. There aren’t really any rest stops in rural Alberta, just roadside pullouts with trash cans for throwing away your garbage. Lots of cows too. We drove up route 36, which feels more like a state highway than a true highway. As far as I can tell, there aren’t any American-style highways in Alberta, except perhaps around the major cities. And the speed limit was 100 km/hr for most of the way (about 65 mph), so it was kind of nice to get back into the States where we could drive faster.

I didn’t get much writing done on the trip, but now that we’re back, that’s hopefully going to change. However, we do have a bunch of stuff going on. My wife is starting her new job at BYU, and also finishing up her dissertation, so that’s the priority right now. I’ll be watching the kids for most of the time, which limits how much I can write (though the family study room on campus is good for working while letting the kids run around). Also, we’re going to move back into our house in Orem over the next couple of weeks, so that’s going to be another big project. But we should hopefully be settled down before the end of the month.

Long story short, things are going to be crazy for a little while, but I should still be able to make at least a little bit of writing progress each day. The two big WIPs I’m working on right now are The Road to New Jerusalem, which I hope to finish before October, and the AI draft of The Soulbond and the Sling, which is more than halfway finished but is still a massive epic fantasy novel. No idea when those WIPs will be done, but for now I’m just going to keep chipping away at them a little at a time, and make more definitive plans later once things are a little more settled.

Independence Day update

Happy 4th of July, everyone! It’s Independence Day here in America, when we celebrate our nation’s birthday by doing all of the most American things possible: fly our flags, eat lots of meat, and blow things up. God bless America!

It’s been a busy month so far, with family visiting from out of town all last week, and lots of kids all over the place. Great for our kids, who got to play with their cousins, but not the best for writing. Oh well. It looks like things are going to settle down for the rest of the month, which is really good, especially for my wife, who is racing to finish her PhD before she starts her new teaching job. So I will definitely be helping her with that.

On the writing and publishing side of things, I am actually going to take advantage of this time to catch up on all of the non-writing things, like publishing tasks, that I’ve fallen behind on. When August rolls around, things are going to get really crazy, with our move back to Orem as my wife starts her new job, so I want things to be set up really well for that.

I will continue writing, though: just at a slower pace. If I plan to do about an hour a day, and make that a consistent thing, I think I can keep that up through the crazy times that are coming. Not only are we moving and starting a new job, but we also have a new baby due to be born very shortly after all of that. So I fully anticipate that it’s going to be a crazy year.

(still not the final cover)

My plan right now is to keep plugging away at The Soulbond and the Sling, slowly but surely, until the AI draft is complete. At the rate that I plan to go, however, it probably won’t be finished until August or September.

I’ll also be working on the human draft of The Road to New Jerusalem, but since my plan is to submit that to the Ark Press contest in October, I’m not too worried about rushing that one. Besides, it’s a much shorter novel, so it shouldn’t be that hard. A part of me wonders if I’ll finish that one before The Soulbond and the Sling.

In the meantime, I plan to publish Bloodfire Legacy in paperback, ebook, and audiobook as soon as I go through the edits and get it formatted! In fact, that’s the next big thing I plan to work on in the next two weeks. With luck, it should be out very soon.

So those are the big things that I’m working on right now. I’m also going to try and finish all the blog posts for Fantasy from A to Z before the end of the month, though they will probably run through the first half of August or so. And once Fantasy from A to Z is done, I will turn that into an ebook exclusive for my newsletter list, and make my current newsletter exclusive, Science Fiction from A to Z, available as a regular ebook (and maybe audiobook and paperback as well).

All of this is part of my plan to pivot toward being more of a fantasy author. Right now, I’m a science fiction author who occasionally writes fantasy. In the future, I want to be known as a fantasy author who occasionally writes science fiction. Most of my science fiction leans heavily into fantasy tropes anyway, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to make the change. Hopefully most of my readers follow me over as I make the transition.

Toward that end, I’m happy to report that Rescuer’s Reward, the first novel in the Sea Mage Cycle, is now available as a permafree book! If you like fun quick fantasy adventures with a touch of romance, I think this will be right up your alley. All of the Sea Mage Cycle books are pretty short, and they all stand alone, though they often have recurring characters. Check it out and give it a read!

Back from Arkansas

So we’re finally back from our family vacation to Arkansas! My youngest sister manages cabins over at the Buffalo River National Park, which means she’s busy over there all summer, so we all decided to go over to her.

It was a looong drive. Took us three days to get down there, mostly because we stayed with my brother-in-law in Omaha for a couple of nights (just long enough for our five year-old to fall in the shower and bust open her head. Took her to the emergency room, where she got a couple of staples. She’s fine.) On the way back, we busted our butts and did it in two days. We must have listened to the Tarzan and Mulan soundtracks thirty or forty times each.

Arkansas is almost like another world. Very beautiful, but mostly jungle, and full of all sorts of venemous things that want to suck your blood. The first day, I made the mistake of walking around in shorts without any bug spray, and I got nearly a dozen deer ticks on me, including one that had crawled up into my unmentionables. My wife and both our kids also had ticks on them. Needless to say, we did very thorough tick checks every day after that.

Other than that, it wasn’t too bad. I heard from one of the locals that there are copperheads and water mocassins in the river, but we didn’t see any of those. Also, the black widows like to roof in the awning and lower themselves down in the evening, but we didn’t see any of those either (thank goodness). And apparently, there’s an annual tarantula migration, which sounds absolutely terrifying. In fact, it sounds like someone in the Ozarks started a game of Jumanji some 150 years ago, and it’s never been finished.

But the people are all friendly and generous, and there’s a tiny little country church almost every other mile in the back country. Also, driving through Branson and southern Missouri was like driving through the heart of Trump country. The Twelve Days War was raging the whole time, and there were MAGA billboards and billboards saying “we stand with Israel.” Kind of surreal.

It was good to spend some time with family, but it’s good to be home now. We just got the staples out of our daughter’s head, and it’s healed just fine. She’s really glad to be able to swim now (too bad she couldn’t swim while we were at the park). For the next week, my brother-in-law from Couer D’Alene is down here with his wife and eight kids for a family vacation. Our kids are having a blast, though our littlest just came down with a stomach bug… hopefully it ends with him, but I’m not holding my breath.

The plan for now is to finish writing all the blog posts for Fantasy from A to Z, hopefully before the end of next week. I’ll also do my best to finish up the rough AI draft of Lord of the Falconstar (book 3 of the trilogy) by the end of this week. So far, it’s going really well. After that, it’s back to the revised AI draft of The Soulbond and the Sling, which I hope to finish before we go on our next road trip to Canada for my wife’s family. And after Fantasy from A to Z is finished, I’ll work on the rough human draft of The Road to New Jerusalem, hopefully finishing it in time for the Ark Press contest.

That’s the plan, anyway. I have a lot of thoughts on the Twelve Days War and the situation in the Middle East, but I’ll save all that for now. If the ceasefire holds and it truly is the end of the war, I think President Trump will go down as the greatest American president of the 21st century.

Summer plans

So summer is practically here, and that means things are about to get crazy. Next week, we’re leaving on a multi-day road trip to Arkansas, where we plan to have a family vacation with the extended family. With a five year-old and a two-year old, that’s going to be quite a ride. Fortunately, we’ll be staying with family from my wife’s side along the way, at least on the way down. Coming back, we’ll just do our best to make a straight shot back to Utah.

After that, things should calm down for the rest of June and most of July. I’m hoping to get a lot of writing work done, especially on The Soulbond and the Sling. With luck, I’ll finish the AI draft of this 200k word epic fantasy before Writer’s Cantina.

I’ll only be at Writer’s Cantina for the first day; we’re leaving on another multi-day family road trip that weekend, this time to Canada, for another extended family vacation with my wife’s side of the family. That’ll only last a couple of days, though, and we should be back pretty soon. But then, things will get really crazy, as we move back to our house in Orem and my wife starts her new job as a professor at BYU.

Oh, and somewhere in the middle of all that, we’ve got to fix the sprinklers at the house up in Orem. They all need to be totally rewired, and the valves in the back should also be replaced. So the yard isn’t going to get much, if any water this season. It’s going to be… interesting… growing a new yard from scratch next year. We’ll probably take advantage of the opportunity to do some xiroscaping and gardening, perhaps even getting a backyard beehive like my wife has wanted to do for some time. But it’s going to take a lot of work.

I’ve decided to scale back my email newsletter, making it a monthly thing instead of a weekly thing. In turn, I plan to blog much more often, roughly daily. I hear that blogging is a great way to optimize for AI, making your work more likely to show up in ChatGPT and other LLMs. So I’m going to blog a lot more about my books from now on. I’m also thinking very seriously about doing some video, I guess with what you’d call “authortube.” I’ll start out with some book readings on YouTube and see where things go from here.

That’s the plan, anyway. It’s going to be a super busy summer, but I’m looking forward to it! I hope you are too.

Five things I did at work last week (and a question–wanna read a free e-arc?)

Things have been so busy around here that I forgot to do this on Monday! But here it is, just a day late.

Last week, I:

  • Wrote about 4k human words in Bloodfire Legacy,
  • Revised about 18k words in The Soulbond and the Sling,
  • Generated another 10k words for The Soulbond and the Sling,
  • Used AI to revise through another 56k words of The Soulbond and the Sling, and
  • Started the outline for the second book in the Rise of the Soulbound King Trilogy, The Soulbond and the Lady.

I am super excited about The Soulbond and the Sling, though I will not release it until the first three books are out. Maybe I’ll post the AI draft to my blog? I think it’s good enough that I can do that. Or maybe I’ll release a free e-arc or something. Still need to think that through–but I would really love to find a way to share this book with people, because it is really a lot of fun. Also, my most ambitious book to date. The final draft will probably clock in somewhere between 150k and 200k words–a solid epic fantasy. And that’s just the first book in the trilogy!

Anyhow, I will try to be better about posting this week, but I am really trying to make as much progress on this WIP over the summer as I can. When the fall comes around, things are going to be crazy busy insane, with our family moving back to Orem, my wife starting a new job, and having a new baby. I may not be able to do any more writing from September to the end of the year, so I’m trying to do as much now as I can!

Five things I did at work last week

Last week, I:

  • Generated 157,560 words to incorporate into The Soulbond and the Sling (I had a lot of Sudowrite credits that were expiring),
  • Revised or incorporated 38,113 AI generated words,
  • Did 21,111 words of human revisions,
  • Completed 25% of The Soulbond and the Sling, and
  • Published a new box set for the Sea Mage Cycle.

I haven’t been blogging a lot lately, but hopefully that’s going to change soon, as there are a lot of thoughts and updates that I ought to share.

Five things I did at work last week

Last week, I:

  • Wrote about 7k new human words, most of them in Bloodfire Legacy,
  • Did about 38k words of AI revisions, most of it in The Soulbond and the Sling,
  • Did about 10k words of human revisions, most of it also in The Soulbond and the Sling,
  • Wrote and sent an email newsletter, and
  • Started writing Fantasy from A to Z.

Five things I did at work last week

Last week was kind of crazy. My in-laws were gone for half of it, and we did a deep clean on the house before they came back. We also did a whole lot of Easter stuff as a family, which was fun, but it kept us very busy (hence the near total lack of blogging). And finally, our two year-old son who has zero pain tolerance came down with hayfever and barely slept at all, which was much less fun. But in between all that, I managed to:

  • write about 17k human words in Bloodfire Legacy, passing the 60% mark on that WIP,
  • touch up the prologue and chapter one of The Soulbond and the Sling, about 10k words or 5% of that WIP,
  • generate a cover for Return of the Starborn Son,
  • plan out the chapters (ie blog posts) for Fantasy from A to Z, and
  • wrote and scheduled this blog post. 😛

Five things I did at work last week

This post is a day late because I sprang for the paid version of ChatGPT over the weekend, mostly to generate… er… images of my wife. For research purposes. But here are my five bullets.

Last week at work, I:

  • Wrote about 10k human words in my current WIP, Bloodfire Legacy.
  • Evaluated my AI writing in the previous draft of this WIP to figure out how to better prep for human writing.
  • Did a monthly planning session.
  • Generated a new cover mock-up for The Soulbond and the Sling with DALL-E3.
  • Launched a $2.99 ebook sale on all my books for the month of April.