Category: Blog

In my mind, every book cover has three stories.

There’s the story the image tells. There’s the story that it covers… i.e. the book itself. And last, but not least, there’s the story of its creation.

Today, I’m thrilled to to reveal the cover for my urban fantasy novel, Investigation, Mediation, Vindication. You’ll be able to judge for yourself what story it tells, if any. As for the story it covers… I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until May to read the book. But in the meantime, I want to tell the third story; the story of the cover’s creation.

This has been quite the month, hasn’t it? At a time when so many people are stuck at home watching the economy tank and coronavirus numbers skyrocket while also trying to figure out how to entertain their children 24/7, blog posts about an indie author and his latest shenanigans rightly rank low on the priority list.

Still… it’s been a month since my last update, and the Indie Author’s Guide to World Domination says a global pandemic is not an acceptable excuse for letting my blog schedule fall by the wayside.

In last week’s blog post, I announced plans to take my two short stories from this site, clean them up, and release them on Amazon. As newsletter subscribers already know, those plans became reality last night!

See These Bones and its sequels are understandably focused on Damian and his struggles, but it’s a big, broken world out there. These tales offer brief glimpses of events and places far beyond Damian’s reach, often touching on locations or secondary characters from the main series. They also give me an opportunity to play around with different perspectives and writing styles.

People seemed to dig the earlier drafts, and I’m thrilled to bring them to the wider audience of Amazon!

February is always a weird month. Shorter than every other month, colder than most, with Valentine’s Day and (in the USA) Presidents Day thrown in just to keep everything confusing. Historically, it’s been a month where I get almost nothing done.

This year’s February has been different. Even more hectic than usual–from a Vancouver trip to house guests to a parade of home warranty excitement–but also more productive. And we’re only halfway through the month? Strange things are afoot, indeed!

One of the great things about being an independent author is that you get to make all the decisions. Feel like writing a fifteen-volume series about trans-dimensional robots searching for fresh strawberries on a lava planet? Go for it. Feel like capitalizing every third word in a sentence? I question the long-term strategy, but you be you. Feel like releasing your book on a certain day? There aren’t any publishers to tell you not to.

It took everything we had. It took grit and gumption and the unconstrained passage of time, but we finally did it. We made it to the new year! A year of optimism, baby yoda memes, 20/20 vision jokes, and, of course, goals and resolutions. Which means it is finally time to share my 2020 writing goals, in all their wildly-optimistic glory.

Dear 2019,

At the risk of repeating myself… you’ve been a year.

The older I get, the more individual years tend to blur together. As a child, every year felt different and new. As an adult, it often feels like one single strand of time, occasionally dotted with holidays and vacations.

The year is almost over, and 2020 is lurking somewhere in the clouds above us, waiting for the moment we should cast our eyes skyward to come crashing down upon us in all of its fury. But we’ll worry about 2020 some other time. Like… a week or so from now. As I did last…

And poof. Just like that, it’s December. Time has a way of speeding up around the holidays, and this year has been no exception. Between See These Bones’ book launch, a five day water fast, Thanksgiving, my birthday, and a trip to Florida for my mother’s birthday, you’d be right to wonder if I’d gotten…

So… a thing happened last week, and contrary to my fears, the world didn’t stop spinning. Nor did the barbarian hordes sweep down from the north to sack Rome for an eighth time. In Las Vegas, we did have a week of unseasonably warm weather for November, but something tells me that had nothing to…