Wow, I've fallen behind on the ol' blogging, haven't I? Well, I have been busy with some other projects. In the last week or so I've focused pretty heavily on the guitar, at one point sitting for four hours working out different tunings for Broken and some Goo Goo Dolls tunes.
More importantly I've started working on Blood and Steel, the sequel to the as-yet-unpublished The Crownless King. It picks up not long after where King leaves off and reveals more of Ben's story and motives and forces Sam to come full circle and take responsibility for his actions. It sounds a bit vague, I know, but I don't want to put too many details out there before The Crownless King gets out there for fear of ruining readers on that novel. I sometimes struggle to remember that my readers aren't seeing what's in my head and don't know what's coming in future projects the way I do. It hampers discussion, at times, but not work.
I did spend some time this week preparing the manuscript of The Crownless King for shipping to CreateSpace and I've got to photograph one more illustration and assemble the cover exactly how I want it before it's all said and done. It's more of a challenge than I thought it was going to be, but still worth the effort.
The Fall Festival is coming up in Clifton Forge in October and with the festival comes the Alleghany Highlands Arts and Crafts Center's 37th Annual Fall Festival Art Show. It's a surprisingly good show for a small town festival and draws many entries from outside the area. I've got two prints ready to go, A Splash of Color and an unnamed shot of Roaring Run, both of which have been posted here. I've never so much as placed in an art show before, but I feel good about this year's entries. That's not saying I'm going to place, but rather that I feel better about giving a good competition. Art shows are a wonderful opportunity to learn about composition and preparing your pieces for show. There's always quality work to be found in these galleries and it's just exciting to have your work hanging in an art gallery for a little while.
And with fall, as I've blogged about before, comes the wonderful reading list. I've read about half of David Liss' works and they've been a joy. I recently finished Post Captain, the second of Patrick O'Brian's Napoleonic War novels. I've got some Star Trek piling up and I think that the newest Voyager novel, Full Circle, came out on Tuesday so it's probably time to start wading through the Trek novels. Salvatore will be coming out with the next Drizzt novel in October, which is a perfect fall classic. At some point when the season really sets in I'll read The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin and The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury, two beloved classics introduced to me in elementary school. Around Christmas time I may actually read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.
I had big plans for the day, yard work and a trip to the dump and getting the outside of the house together for the fall, but Mother Nature and The Weather Channel had other plans. So I think that I'll spend the day reading, packing to go to West Virginia, doing what few chores there are to do inside and writing.
It's a good life.
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