Tuesday Afternoon Rambles

Well, the blogging has fallen behind a little bit, but it's been a busy life.

The Christmas season is upon us and life is beautiful. The tree is up, the house is lit and there are snowmen around my house. My Christmas shopping is nowhere close to being finished, but that is another story.

In the midst of all the holiday cheer we've been hard at work on the literary front. The Crownless King is available for purchase from Amazon. I'm obviously not rich from the royalties and movie deals yet, but hopefully one day. Devan and I, believe it or not, have been hard at it on the revision process of The Sixth Sword. Not only that, we've been delving into The Sea of Souls which lays a great deal of groundwork for what's to come in the series. We much prefer writing to revising but you can't have one without the other.

The photography business has really been booming. We've had almost more portraits than we can keep up with and we had a great bridal portrait session at The Homestead last night. The famous hotel and resort was completely decked out for Christmas and it was a sight worth seeing. Before last night I had never made it up there for Christmas and now I hope to make it a yearly trip.

I haven't had time to venture out into the wilderness for the outdoor photography that I love to do and I'm hoping to have the opportunity after the first of the year. Right now I just have too many irons in the fire, so to speak.

Writing has been occupying a good deal of my creative focus these past weeks. Finishing a novel and having it published is a very energizing experience. It gives me a boost to dive into other projects and gets me moving past the sometimes painful start up process.

Devan and I have discovered how truly difficult it is to accomplish what we hope to pull off. You see, the first two books, Chaos Reborn and The Sixth Sword were originally intended to be one novel. Our first publisher chose to split them in half. So, really, it takes these two novels to make one. Originally, way back in elementary school, we had planned on writing one book. As we began to read more in the world of fantasy later in life we decided we wanted to explore our world a bit more and make a series. We dropped hints at a great many things in the first two books, especially in The Sixth Sword. The task of fleshing out that foreshadowing has been more complicated than we first thought.

So along with the actual writing process, we're solidifying the world of Tehra Fahm. The map will expand and be more fully realized. We'll also have outlines of the ranks of the Alee and more information as to the underlying plot that will tie everything together through the series. If we do our jobs well, by the time you read the finale of the series you'll hopefully feel like you've gotten your money's worth out of it all.

Many out there are asking about a publishing date for The Sixth Sword. Hang in there. You have my sincere apologies for how long this has dragged out, but unfortunately matters weren't totally in my control. They still aren't. Devan has military duties that will likely take him halfway across the world for a year. We've already figured out how we're going to deal with this and our tentative plan is this:

Before he leaves for training, we will have went through the novel together (and we're almost finished with that) and I will spend the next couple of months polishing up the final manuscript. In the meantime, he and I both will be working at The Sea of Souls as Susan continues her excellent work in filling out the illustrations we would like to have. Most likely, when Devan returns, we'll go through it all one last time before putting it in print and should then follow up very quickly with The Sea of Souls. There is the possibility of an earlier date, but right now we're looking at next spring to be on the shelves.

That's three and a half years between novels, far too long as fans of George R.R. Martin will surely agree, but please stay with us. Quite frankly we learned a lot from the first experience and some of the delay has been dealing with what we learned and adding it into the process of creating a novel. If you can have the patience to deal with the delay just a little longer, we'll provide you with a satisfying read.

In the meantime, pick up a copy of The Crownless King. I'll be happy to sign it for anyone who wants me to and can probably even get an autograph for you from Heather.

This week promises to be very, very busy, but I'm planning on getting back into the swing of blogging. It sharpens the writing skills and tends to clear my head when it needs it.