Long time no blog. I see the last one was in Sept 2012. My dad had massive open heart surgery in Oct 2012. I helped take care of him. He recovered from it but passed away in Sept 2013 from euthanasia. There's a long story behind that. When he got to the hospital, all his test results were normal except for his CO2 count. The hospital didn't want to treat him, but they eventually did and and released him. He picked up a staph infection while there and had to go right back in. They didn't treat him that time. They used a legal maneuver to take away his food, keep him awake for long periods of time and pump him with steroids to kill him. Long story short: the death panels are already here. Think I'm paranoid? The hospital never billed for any of it. They took what insurance paid and never sent a bill for the rest. Enough of that for now. It's too depressing to go into.
Early in 2013 Linda A. that I dedicated the series to also passed away. The A stands for Alkire. She wanted to be anonymous, but she deserves a lot of credit that I can give her now. Besides my dad's surgery, 2012 was a very hard year on its own, and with the losses so was 2013.
What's going on now with the books? I just uploaded re-edited versions of Chronicles 2, 3 and 4. The revised Chronicle 1 should go up in a few days or maybe next week after I check the changes in it to make sure no new errors crept in. I need to go through the new live versions of 2, 3 and 4 and make sure they are as they should be. I have to check those before uploading 1 because it will cause an update on anyone's Kindle who has it, and a lot of people downloaded 1 for free. I want things to be right in case the people who didn't read it start reading and move on to the rest of the series.
There are no major changes. The original plan was to fix some "errors" where a couple of characters did or said things that didn't properly reflect the Way. I put them in to show that they weren't perfect and were still learning and growing. But I was never comfortable with it and finally said enough was enough. Since I haven't worked on the books in a while I was able to see all kinds of embarrassing things that needed polishing. It turned into a re-edit. Most of the changes are polishing type things like changing awkward verb tenses and smoothing things out for better readability. For instance, I dropped "he said" at the end of sentences that didn't need them or turned "Ceinwen said" into "she said" where it made more sense and was more readable. I deleted a sentence here and there and fixed some trivial continuity errors. Overall the books are more professional and read more smoothly.
The story is the same. Changing anything would take virtually forever. There are too many details for that. However, at some point I'd like to hire a professional editor.
What's next? I'm still at about the halfway point on the space novel rough draft. I think I've blogged about it. It's set in the future of the current series in the time of Calan Sterrit. I also am about halfway through the rough draft for an inspirational romance set in the present day. To pen name or not to pen name? That is the question. :) I was working on that as a break from Messengers and making extremely good progress until my dad had the CO2 problem. I'm going to try to work on the space novel and the romance at the same time. Finish the rough draft of one then switch and finish the other. Go back to the first one for an editing pass then do a pass on the other. I think it'll help keep my eyes fresh for things that need fixing. If nothing else terrible happens, I should get them both out the door this year. Unless I get an agent for the romance. I'm thinking about that. Maybe for both of them. I believe I'm at the point in my writing where it would make sense. We'll see.
What about the MMO? Back burner. Hero Engine changed the fee structure so I couldn't bring people on the project without paying even more money.With that and everything else there's just not enough time right now. However, the license is still active, and more success with the books should get things on track.
