Celtic Bard: Blog

All right , ladies and gents, I know there has been no new news on the posting or book fronts in a couple of weeks and that is because chaos decended on my life unexpectedly. I got busy at work for about a week and then scheduled repairs to my house somehow surprised me. All that goes towards saying that until some things return to normal the most you might look forward to in the next week or so is the posting of the second chapter of Anomaly of the Fates, which is complete but unedited. Sorry for the delays . . . again!

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.

Update time! New stuff first! The second chapter of Anomaly of the Fates is almost finished. I know those of you waiting for more on the older stuff are pulling your hair out right now, but the second chapter is just going to be the completion of the scene foreshadowed in the first chapter and maybe a little bit more.

After that, the next most likely thing to be finished is the next chapter of Enter the Darkness. I was working on that one recently and it was flowing really good before I got interupted. Future Distorted is kind of stalled while I figure out how to wrap up the next chapter.

As for other stuff, Sagas of Pain, the third story in my Akikara the Mad story arc is through the editing process and I am currently putting together the Am'mortal anthology I have been talking about (I have settled on Tales of Immortality: The Wanderer and Akikara Sagas as a title). Whether it will be done before the holidays or not is up in the air, but I can hope. I am also working, albeit slowly, on the rest of The Death of Love in Morristown. It is going at a glacial pace mostly because I am not sure how I want to get where I want to go with the story. Inspiration has been lacking on that one. I have other irons on the fire, but they are either not ready for posting or will be published at a date to be announced.

That is all on the update front. Everyone have a Happy-whatever-Holiday-you-celebrate-or-don't-celebrate and try not to overdo it on New Year's Eve!

Sorry folks, not a new chapter (as in YES! He finally posted more Alexandra!) but unfortunately I was sitting in front of my computer with a migraine and hoping I could find something to take my mind off of the pain. I happened to open something I have been working on off and on (more off than on) and as I read what I had thus far, something popped and I started writing all the way to the end of the first chapter of Anomaly of the Fates. Since it had been a while since I posted anything, I decided to get this up there in lieu of the next chapter of Enter the Darkness or Future Distorted. Sorry to all of you still waiting on those, I wish I could give you something more on when they will be ready but I can't.

On another note, I have posted a snippet of Sagas of Pain, the Akikara the Mad story I had been workng on in my efforts to pull together an Am'moral anthology for publishing sometime before the new year. You can find that on my external blog at:

http://jmfhildebrandt.livejournal.com/

So enjoy those two things an hopefully more of the other stuff you have been waitng on will be forthcoming soon.

I know it has been a while since I wrote on this blog, but my post-September 11th fog lasted longer this year than usual. With that came the disinclination to write anything for a while. That, combined with a busy work schedule of late, meant not much got done. That changed about a week or two ago when the urge to finish Sagas of Pain overtook me. It is the final of three Akikara the Mad stories I had planned to write and unfortunately I will not be posting it online due to the fact that I am going to include it in an Am'mortal anthology (Stories of the Immortal, tentative title) I am putting together for Kindle and Nook. I will try to work on another Wanderer story that will also go in it. The anthology will be three Wanderer stories, three Akikara the Mad stories, and various background stuff like the Timeline and appendices I have sitting in my computer. I am aiming for sometime before the new year on the anthology, but my ability to judge time on writing projects is lousy.

As for stuff that will be posted, I am hoping to get back to Enter the Darkness and Future Distorted soon. Especially Enter the Darkness, as it is about to enter the endgame phase, though I am having trouble figuring out how to get there from where the story is currently. I recently got the inspiration for the beginning of the next Alexandra McKiernan story while about to fall asleep. Highly inconvenient and highly interesting. It sent me down a path of more bloody research for the entire Enter the Darkness Universe that was somewhat inconvenient but had the side-effect of kickstarting my writing.

Anyway, that is all for now.