So, we made it! No Mayan calamity, no ending of the world. Happy New Year! I know I am a little late on this and I probably should have written an update sooner, but between working on Tales of Immortality, football, and assorted relative-related occasions, I got a little busy and completely forgot about it until yesterday when I took a break from working on the new book to check my mail and accidentally hit the bookmark for my blog. Since I was still busy, I decided to put this off until today.
An Update
As I mentioned last time it was update time, I was probably never going to make the holiday season hope I had for myself and once I got into messing around with the Appendices of Tales of Immortality: The Wanderer and Akikara Sagas, that hope died a gruesome death. I made the mistake of remembering that I did a pronunciation guide to Justice Resurrected, that I plan to do one for the Kindle/Nook version of Reign of Madness, and decided to do one for Tales as well. That unfortunate turn of events led me down the path of pronunciating the hell out of the entire book, meaning I have been working for about two weeks on writing pronunciations for many of the people and place names that appear in the Appendices section of Tales as well as pronunciation guides for each of the short stories in the book. It is long, slow, boring work which is occasionally interrupted by spurts of "what-the-hell-did-I-write-it-like-that-for?" This, of course, leads to a certain amount of rewriting of minor points along the way along with some reformatting due to jolts of OCD-ish perfectionism that afflicts me at times. All this goes towards saying that I am close to being done but not done yet. Meaning Tales of Immortality probably has at least a couple of more weeks of work before it finally gets out there.
On a side note, if anyone wants to volunteer their artistic talents to cover making, I would be very appreciative and you would get all the credit for the cover. Otherwise I will probably simply cobble something together using the maps of Qaryesh t'Marne that I have and go with that. I was thinking something along the lines of a split picture of the Wanderer on a river bank on one side and Akikara on the side of a dead volcano overlooking the jungle on the other. Give the Am'mortal short stories a read if you need inspiration. Akikara is pretty distinctive and in my head the Wanderer is kind of an unwrinkled cross between Sir Ian McKellan as Gandalf and Sir Richard Harris as Dumbledore.
As for anything else, unless I get the overwhelming urge to write on something, the other stuff is on temporary hold. I put that proviso in because I had the urge to write something new the other day as I was reading a Lilith Saintcrow novel but I managed to master it due to the fact that I was getting ready for bed. I may decide to come back to it at a later date . . . or my Muse might decide to get uppity and lay in an order for larger anvils. I am hoping for the former.
That is all for now. Hopefully my next posting will be effusive with triumph over finally finishing Tales of Immortality.