It’s good to be back! Last week was wonderful—my brother got married to an amazing woman and the two are off on their honeymoon, and I got to spend a lot of time with family I rarely see. Unfortunately, relative to the purpose of this blog, that means I didn’t get a whole lot of writing done, but the week was a nice break nonetheless.

The Failed Technomancer

Some feedback is coming in, and it is exciting! No formal reviews yet, but The Failed Technomancer did appear in a recent unboxing on the channel Tome Raider. Here’s the video below, which should be timestamped to the exact moment The Failed Technomancer is revealed:

If the link doesn’t take you directly to my book, it’s about 13:00 that she does the reveal.

I’m also getting some heart-meltingly positive feedback from Mason in the Dark, which makes me exceptionally excited for when his review of the audiobook gets finished and posted. (I won’t share a quote here since I didn’t ask for permission to share quotes from non-public conversations.)

And finally, I have to share a picture from a friend that speaks a thousand words:

Fortunately, Duke’s a tough dog who doesn’t scare easily, so The Failed Technomancer was an exciting read for him.

Inner Demon

Remember how I said I didn’t get a lot of writing or editing done last week? Yes, I’m still on chapter 1 with regards to the line edit. My goal this week is to line edit a chapter a day—although I’m giving myself a significant amount of wiggle room on that goal through Thursday, since I have a currently-unfinished lecture to deliver at YANCON that day. Once YANCON is over I will hold myself to two or three chapters a day, and then I’ll get the book out to readers to help with the copy edit and final polishing.

This also means we’re probably not too far off of sample chapters—a month or two, I would expect.

Anyway, despite delays, Gnyphe’s journey is looking to be coming along right on schedule!

Grand Odyssey

If I’m behind my goals on Inner Demon, I’m even more behind on Grand Odyssey, but once again I’m not currently beating myself up on it. More details when I get started in earnest on finishing draft one, but rest assured that Mariynne’s adventures on a flying boat, a sea of clouds, and airborne islands is not getting forgotten…

Other Thoughts

With my full-time job picking up, my writing and editing time might become more constricted, in which case progress on all projects might slow down and I might have less to update on each week. Should that happen, I’ll probably slow down to update every other week, but hopefully my writing time never gets restricted enough to slow me down to updating once a month—I shudder at the thought.

That all said, writing is a passion, and, though I’m trying to turn writing into a career, I don’t plan on quitting writing books, whatever happens. Plan on sticking around and seeing me here for a long time!

As an additional side note—what sort of things would you be interested in seeing offered as an incentive to sign up for a newsletter? I keep racking my brain for ideas, and here’s what I’ve got so far:

• Short stories (I have a few I’d like to clean up and would be willing to share)
• “Deleted scenes” from published novels
• Draft one manuscripts from completed novels (with a heavy disclaimer that first drafts are almost universally terrible…), perhaps with commentary

No idea if any of these would be a strong draw or not, but I’m willing to hear feedback (or additional ideas). Most likely I’ll do most or all of what people find interesting.

“Bloggyness”

Once again, I’d like to leave a reminder that, as yet, there are no affiliate links on my blog, except the obvious being that if you go to a vendor and buy my book I get a royalty. I just include links because I like the convenience of being able to click on something that interests me and being taken directly to it, and I’m sure other readers do, too.

With that out of the way, The Reluctant Swordsman, Dave Duncan, deeply disappointed me. I was incredibly excited for the premise of the book—an everyday Joe from our world dies in a hospital and his spirit is sent to inhabit the body of a barbarian warrior in another world. Wallie Smith, our protagonist, then decides to play along with what he ultimately determines must be some sort of delusion. The idea sounded very fun, possibly hilarious, and was promised to be paired with an interesting, fantastical world with a strict social order that would lead to very unique dynamics between characters.

Unfortunately, the book did not live up to the premise and some strange decisions made by the author. As a very big note, I was made really uncomfortable with the treatment of the women in this book. There were only three female “characters,” each of which was a slave and almost exclusively used as a sex object—and probably intended by the reader to be viewed that way, too, given where most of the descriptions were focused. To say it more lightly than the book probably deserves, the whole situation was very gross, despite putting the sexual activity into the background of the book and the author’s regular efforts to justify the situation largely through cultural context. (If anything, that made it worse.) For me, I didn’t care if any aspect of the cultural situation might have justified the actions of certain characters within that culture: this is still a work of fiction that intentionally included behavior and attitudes that I found repugnant. Now, sometimes repugnant activity in a book can strengthen a story, when handled well and particularly when used to make villains genuinely evil—for example, murder is repugnant, but most people won’t put down a book in disgust because a villain murders someone. That’s what made this book particularly gross, for me: how openly supportive the heroes were of the whole situation. Or, if not supportive, then accepting and nonchalant, for some.

It just wasn’t necessary, it didn’t do anything to elevate the nastiness of a villain, it didn’t make a point that so badly needed to be said that it justified this kind of fiction, it was just there and it was gross and it left me uninterested in discussing the elements of the book that would otherwise be praiseworthy.

To end on a more positive note, I have every reason to believe the next book on my list, The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook to Surviving Medieval England, will be a fun and satisfying romp that will be accompanied with a positive review for you all. I don’t read as quickly as I once did, so it might be a bit, but stay tuned.