Karesh Ni is the sequel to Bloodharvest. It’s comparatively ‘Modern Day’ in Pallas.
Twilight in Heaven is in the dawn ages. It’s part of my Silmarillion.
Ebook
Mara and the Trolls Kindle Version is opened for preorders and will go live on Amazon June 1st.
The paperback should go live May 15th, but Amazon isn’t taking preorders for that. If they do, I don’t know how to do it yet.
The ebook will go up for $10 ($9.99), and the paperback for $14.99. Pricing is largely set by Amazon, and I don’t have a whole lot of control over those levers. This a full length book though, about 279 pages. BH was much shorter.
Speaking of BH, I’m not sure why the new edition isn’t automatically updating on Kindle readers and the Windows app. I’m going to work on that while I’m waiting for responses on the Mara stuff.
Self Publishing
Every single part of self publishing takes longer than you would expect. I thought I’d have the paperback of Bloodharvest up weeks ago.
I submitted the manuscript to Amazon and got a proof. It looked fine. Not great, not terrible, it was fine. Wanting something a little better than fine, I shopped around for someone to do layout. I found someone (I’m going to put his contact information up in the Books page when I’ve got everything done) who did a full layout, but it took a few weeks including both work and searching through samples. He was great. After reading through the layout for the paperback, I realized it was much, much better than the ebook layout, so I took his recommendation for an ebook layout service and contracted them. They said by the end of next week or the beginning of the one after, they’ll have my layout done.
Meanwhile I resubmitted the paperback and found that the revision resulted in some cover bleed. The number of pages changed, so now the cover doesn’t quite fit. No worries. My cover designer (also to be revealed when all the books are ready) said she was more than happy to fix things. It’s just a scaling issue. Her schedule allows her to take care of it next week.
So next week, or maybe the week after, I’ll have a paperback and an ebook with the improved interior up on Amazon. Unless something else comes up.
OTOH, I had a complete surreal moment holding my proof. It’s signed and dated, the first of my fiction to be printed, and it’s on my desk. It’s almost done. I just need some text shrunk, and it will go live on Amazon. Concurrently the ebook should be sent back, and that will go live too. They’re both vastly better than what I could have done myself.
I wrestled with that for a while. Your humble narrator is not rolling in money, and layout is not cheap.
But it’s worth it. The product is just better. And while it’s all well and good to trumpet things aren’t people and we shouldn’t care too much, creating something like this, a book of my words and my ideas, is a reflection of me.
Goblin names
Goblins in general have a language more devoted to function over form than most human tongues. Names of places and things are often concatenations of nouns or simple phrases. Phonetics are not as commonly used. Personal names are occasionally pure phonetics as well as shortened phrases that no longer have intrinsic meaning, but for places and things, this is uncommon. The separation between names and titles in non-people is slight in most goblin tongues.
Bloodharvest itself was named so because it was what goblins call a prison and what humans would call an extermination camp. The prisoners were inflicted with needless cruelty in the form of toil. While literal efforts were devoted to digging, the end goal of such labor was death of the prisoners. Their blood was harvested.
Complexity arose as it does in all aspects of goblin society by the effects of Krat. All fights are one on one in Krat. Astrologamage Elegy found no humans or elves in Bloodharvest other than Aehr’s comrades, but a great many goblin prisoners. These prisoners could not be executed explicitly, for in Krat they could fight their captors one on one until death or freedom. The combination of beating, starvation, and the perils of unsafe digging itself executed the prisoners instead.
The Temple of Luminance is another goblin location. That is the location’s name, and it is important to keep in mind that the distinction between ‘Temple of Luminance’ as a proper noun and temple as a title with luminance a modifier simply isn’t a strong distinction. Another location called the Temple of Thunder is not necessarily closer connection to the Temple of Luminance than two men, George Phillips and George Smith, are because they share a given name.
Publishing
A while ago I helped my father move a desk. It was a ponderous old thing, built like a cube of solid wood. It had to weigh a hundred pounds. But it wasn’t that hard to move for the same reason: it was built like a cube of solid wood. I could grab it anywhere. The top had a lip, and being a plank, I could carry it by that lip. The legs were thick posts bolted to the body and ran straight to the top where it was screw together. Any possible orientation of the desk had big, beautiful hand-holds.
Comparatively, when I moved in Maryland last, I had one of those light, particle board desks that was a bear to move. It was trivially light, about thirty pounds, and between two people it was lighter than a moderate backpack. It was nothing. But it was made of nothing, and you couldn’t hold it any which way because it would break. It crumbled under finger pressure.
The light desk was vastly more challenging to move through hallways and doors than the heavy one because every movement was a calculation. We couldn’t just shove the little one. Dad’s heavy desk cared not. It cared nothing for walls, because the walls were going to break before that thing. Orientation was no concerned because every angle had a great hold. The little one was almost impossible, and I wound up throwing the light thing away so I wouldn’t have to deal with it any more.
Publishing is moving the light desk. Nothing is really hard. Writing the book is hard, but publishing it isn’t. I’ve worked with several freelance editors, and the lead content editor on Bloodharvest, September C Fawkes, was a delight to work with. She did all the heavy lifting on that project. But I used to write in LibreOffice, so I had to convert files. Then in Word I reformatted them, and formatted them again when Augustin of Wordy did brave battle with atrocious grammar. Bowker is the reason monopolistic behavior requires regulation.
Here’s the kicker. None of that was more than an annoyance. None of it was hard, certainly not compared to writing the stupid thing. What was a problem was that every step was a calculation, and I never really knew what the next step was. At no point was step C clear from B, and I was rarely confident that step A had been completed to perfection. It was just anomalous difficulty.
Where I’m going with all this is that Bloodharvest is now in the Amazon Kindle store here.
I wanted it done, so I could approach Bedtime Stories with some idea of how to publish. I wanted a road map, and in self publishing, I had to make my own. It’s done now.
What do you think? Is it reasonable or not? Are there typos? Is the price respectable? You can read it free in a few places by clicking on theArchives tab. If any of the readers want real, live input on a published novella, now’s your opportunity.
As I look now, the cover preview doesn’t appear. I need to fix that, and I don’t know how. I really want to know how the table of contents works on other devices.
How do I feel about it? I don’t know. I’m elated it’s out there and worried because of the same. I’m resolved. Bedtime Stories and Death Mountain are coming, and I don’t have any fear now that I won’t be able to self publish them. But I also don’t know how I will. It’s not a cheap endeavor.
I’m relieved. It’s done. It’s like my first 5k. A 5k may be nothing, and there are pro authors who drop novels and novellas like it’s nothing, but they’re not me. I don’t have to beat them. I have to beat the guy I was yesterday, and as of this writing, me of 24hrs ago didn’t have a book on Amazon.
Bedtime Stories to editing by Jan 1st, 2019. Death Mountain, full length, 1st draft written by Feb 1st 2019. The timelines of the goals are flexible. Accomplishing them isn’t.
Tapas
I updated the Archives page with locations.
Tapas episode 4 can be found at https://tapas.io/series/Bloodharvest
Current Work
I finally found a cover-designer for Bloodharvest. Third time’s the charm, right? With a little luck that will be ready to go soon. An ebook is first in line, and a POD physical book is right behind that.
Otherwise, I’ve shifted Bedtime Stories to my main tasking, pushing DM back. I’ve got a problem I don’t know how to solve short of everybody dying. _I’m_ okay with everybody dying, but I don’t think anyone else is. Meanwhile I realized I had an ending to BS, and I think it works. After the second draft is done I’ll submit that to my editors. I’m aiming for another double release in early 2019.
Tapas
The pursuit of self publishing BH is in the middle of episode 3, The Search for a Cover. In the meantime the final version is being posted to Tapas.io here:
https://tapas.io/series/Bloodharvest
The first episode was posted on Halloween, and another episode will go up weekly.
If anyone’s just following me, the BH manuscript is complete. I’ve received the final copyedit and made my revisions. As such, I have high hopes for a continuous every-Wednesday publishing schedule until completion. Seeing how these things work, Denver will be obliterated by meteors within a week.
DM is proceeding. I’m trying to get a handle on how to write full novels, so this one is aimed at a longer form. The pursuit of traditional publishing is in episode 946, titled: “Yeah, Still No” which is the same as what the agents and publishers say. I wish they mailed physical letters so I could nail them to a wall. These days will be rued.