All about me!

Would you look at that. I haven’t posted anything to this blog in over a year. To think I used to post three or four times a week. And almost none of them were about myself. Madness!

Well, to keep with the theme, I guess I have to write about myself again. A lot of stuff has gone on since I announced the sale of The Breaking World to 47North, and I should really get all those who’re interested updated.

First off, all three books in the initial run of the fantasy series Dave and I wrote are now complete. Dawn of Swords was published in January, while Wrath of Lions is set to be released on April 22^nd. Add to that the fact that Blood of Gods is perilously close to being sent to copyediting, and you can tell how busy of a year it’s been for me. That’s 620,000 words of fiction written in 15 months. Something I never thought would be accomplished, has been. And I couldn’t be happier.

In other news (and this should’ve been posted a long while back), over the course of two months, from August until October of this past year (and while writing the rough draft of Wrath of Lions), I went through and did a complete re-edit of the entire Rift series. That was something I’ve been pining to do for a very long time. There were just certain things about the series that wore on me, from typos to style to an ending that I (and a number of reader) felt was rushed. So I dove in and made over three thousand corrections, as well as added an extra 10,000 words, most of which come at the book’s climax. Hopefully, the added material will make the final battle feel much more real, and add some much-needed closure for characters that had been unfairly ignored by me. Personally, I think it enhances the story greatly.

As it stands, the revised version of The Rift is only available in the four-book omnibus. For now, the individual books remain the same as they were when they were originally published, though only available in e-book format. The print version of the series is now offered in two separate volumes. Also, unlike when I first put the omnibus together last year, the digital version contains all of Jesse’s awesome artwork. Yay for progress!

Oh, and now The Fall e-book is permanently available for free, so there's that as well.

So we have the Breaking World books and The Rift news. To add to that, there’s a short story I wrote coming down the pike any day now. The story’s called Silence, and it will be included in Shock Totem issue 8.5, which is a collection of love stories told with a horror slant. The story I submitted might be my favorite ever, so I can’t wait for the day that gets released. Oh, and there’s also another short I’m writing for an invite-only anthology called My Peculiar Family. The story’s not finished yet, but it will be in the next day or so, and it’ll be another good one when it is. Thanks, Kristi, for inviting me! That anthology should see the light of day sometime at the end of the summer of 2014.

All of which begs the question: where is Rob going from here? Well, Dave and I still have three more books to write together—Kings of Ruin, Prince of Beasts, and Queen of Lies—in order to finish off our tale of Dezrel’s beginnings. To be honest, after writing the first three books in that series so damn quickly, we’re both suffering from a bit of burnout, so we’re going to put off starting those for a little bit. In the meantime, I’m going to go ahead and write the rough draft of The Mirror of Souls, which was placed on the backburner when the opportunity to work with Dave came about. That story’s all I’ve been able to think about for a couple weeks now, and I can’t wait to dive in. Jacqueline Talbot is calling out to me, folks. Tell my story, she says, and rather creepily at that. I’m getting the shivers just thinking about it!

However, just because I’m writing that book doesn’t mean it’s going to be released anytime soon. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do with it. I haven’t decided if I want to self-publish or find a home with an actual publisher (if that’s even an option). Another thing to take into consideration is books 4-6 of The Breaking World. Should the pressure mount to dive into that world once more, that’s something I’ll have to do. If that happens, any public sighting of Jacqueline’s first solo effort would be delayed indefinitely. While I do plan on having the rough draft finished by the end of April, I couldn’t justify putting out a single tome of a four-book series, only to let the readers sway in the wind for a year or two. Nope, not gonna happen.

In other words, everything’s still up in the air. All I do know is that I have two short stories and two more books coming out in the next eight months. And that, in and of itself, is something to be excited about.

Thanks for stopping by and listening, and hopefully I can start keeping this blog a little more active than it’s been.

But no promises. :-)

Rob D