Jackson Lear's Blog, page 2

Still not dead!

It should probably come as no surprise that I still suck at keeping you guys up to date. It's been a busy six months since the third Raike book came out and – honestly – I kinda forgot that I had a website.

So, Jackson, tell us about your 2019 so far ...

I got to have TWO holidays! It's been ten years since I've had a proper holiday and this year I've managed to have two of them! The first was a cruise from Melbourne to Brisbane. Some things I didn't realise:
Just how much the ship moves from side to side.
Just how much I can eat during a 21-hour buffet.
That I was made for trivia nights.
That the cheesy entertainment is actually quite entertaining.

Did I do the Titanic move? Of course. Did I sneak onto every floor? You betcha! Did I drink too much at the gin bar? Not even close.

We had a stopover in Sydney, in Sydney Harbour, right next to the bridge and the opera house. That was cool.
In Brisbane I got to fly in one of the world's smallest planes – a two-seater (me behind the pilot). That was awesome!
Then there was a lot of house work to be done. We had the floors levelled, bits of walls knocked down, the kitchen blown open, a bunch of trees cut down … you know, the sort of work that makes your home look like a construction site. Bleagh.

The big holiday was in Europe and guess whose passport expired in February and which dingbat didn't check it until the night before he was supposed to fly out? That's right – this guy.

We began in Yorkshire, flew to Switzerland, trained it through to Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, and then made it back to Manchester. We were there for five weeks which was a little too long, since we were hopping from one place to another every few days. But the sights were great, the food was good, and the company was excellent.
In work news, I have just completed the third draft of Raike 4. It's now in the hands of my editor and I'm trying to have that published in early October. The story focuses on a younger Raike, on his first major heist with his old company of mercenaries. Naturally, things go wrong and it's up to Raike to save the day.

The book was a challenge to write mostly because of the two aforementioned holidays. It seriously broke my writing flow and – coupled with jet lag – I lost a lot of time writing. Because I had a half-finished book while travelling around Europe it was still very much on my mind, but I just didn't have an opportunity to get the words down. This meant that by the time I was back home I just didn't have the same kind of motivation as before, and spending six months on a book wore me out.

What am I doing now? Taking a week off, catching up on some chores, and with any luck I'll be back to work this coming Monday to write Raike 5.

Peace.

Cold Blooded - Raike 3, is out now!

Things always get a little weird at publishing time. When I finally submit a book to the powers that be it becomes locked for three days prior to publishing (assuming that it's on pre-order, which most of my books have been). It's three days where I start to wonder if I've loaded the right file. Did I actually load a dummy version of the book and I'm about to sell a blank version to a lot of pissed off people? Is there some glaring mistake on the first page that I can't do anything about until the book is published?

Then launch days comes along and I'm checking to see how everything went, shout to the skies that the new book is out, send a bunch of emails, Facebook posts, write my tri-annual blog, do what I can to distract myself, and then wonder if anyone will actually like the book (aside from me, but I'm biased).

Anyway: Cold Blooded – Raike 3, is out now. What's it about? Raike (a mercenary in a sword and sorcery universe) and Alysia Kasera (Raike's boss' daughter) are on a secret mission to topple a foreign king and break the alliance he has with a vampire clan. Why? Because vampires are assholes and this alliance is probably going to direct the blood suckers to kill as many of Alysia's people as they can. Along for the ride are a few dozen of General Kasera's best soldiers, who are fully aware that their actions here are not going to be sanctioned and the only way this goes well for them is if Alysia is able to convince the king's rival to stage a coup and take the throne for himself. What happens? Things go wrong. What happens after that? It becomes an epic fight for survival, trapped in a foreign land with enemies gathering on all sides, desperate to work out who betrayed them and who among their former enemies they can still trust.

Get your copy here.


So, what's next for me? I'm going on holiday! Seriously, I have not had a holiday in years. I'll be in England, Switzerland, and hopefully Iceland if I get around to booking that leg in time. I expect to have some downtime but the truth is I began writing Raike 4 a couple of weeks ago in the hope that I would have it finished (but not published) before flying out, but that ain't gonna happen. So I'll probably be tinkering with the story and spending more hours staring into a screen than seeing the rolling hills of Yorkshire or the geysers of Iceland. My best guess for publishing Raike 4 is August, but let's be honest here: I have never made a deadline. Books get longer, life gets busy, and there's always a hundred things to do on any given day.

Anyway, happy reading!

Save the date for Raike 3 – 17 March

For some of you the book is less than 24 hours away. For others it's a little more. Either way, Cold Blooded – the third Raike book – is on its way!

Things might've gone well … if they weren't ambushed on their first night.

When an unsanctioned mission to depose a tyrant king goes catastrophically wrong, Raike finds himself having to use every trick he knows to get the people he was hired to protect back home before it's too late.

Get it here!

The Kingston Raine Box Set!

News of the day: The Kingston Raine series has now been bundled into two box sets, each one for only $6.99! That's over 2,000 pages of supernatural mayhem for less than the price of a large pizza!


What's it all about?

Even the Grim Reaper can have a bad day. When one of Hell's inept devils scares the wrong man to death, the Grim Reaper and Satan are forced to cover it up so that none of Limbo's lawyers can discover the truth. But this simple mishap sets off a chain of events that brings Death face to face with someone who has the power to strip him of all his authority: a bureaucratic angel desperate to up-end the afterlife and rule with an iron fist.

If Death has any hope of saving mankind he must put his faith in the one man more troublesome than Satan himself: Kingston Raine.


Grab each bundle for only $6.99!
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Amazon
Kobo
Nook
Google Play
Smashwords

So, what else has been happening? In December I moved house. That threw my production schedule right out the window (and also explains how I forgot to post any details for the release of the second Raike book). October was largely consumed by looking for somewhere to live, November was chaotic with booking movers, utilities, and all the tedious things that happen when you move across the city, and December was mostly settling in and doing odd jobs around the place. But now things are a lot less chaotic so it's back to the grindstone.

I'm almost nearly kinda finished with the third Raike book. If all goes well I should have it complete by the end of January (which probably means I'll still be at it a week into February). Then it's off to my editor and further final tweaks, followed by a drop kicked into the world. I have no idea when, exactly. Maybe February, maybe March. But it's coming soon.

The Blade Within – Out Now!

That's right folks, it's the season for promotions. This fantasy thriller will make you taller, sexier, smarter, and younger.
Someone kidnapped the wrong girl.

Twelve hours ago Raike didn’t even know she existed. Nor would he have cared. That was until the only clue to her kidnapping lay in a cryptic note foretelling her death - a note Raike has seen once before. Now he’s prepared to lose everything to get her back.

Standing in his way is an alliance of two mercenary companies, a city watch who cares more about stopping Raike than finding the missing girl, and an imperial general who had little to fear – until Raike came along.

A gripping fantasy thriller that will keep your heart racing until the very end.


Get it now!

You can also pre-order the second Raike book: Protected.

New Series!

All right, so I really do suck at keeping everyone up to date with what's going on. So what's been happening?

New job, house hunting, soon to be house moving, and scrambling to finish a new book with a self imposed deadline. And for once I'm not wildly off track! (He says, having not even finished the book yet …)

Most excitingly: I am about to launch a new series! This one is a fast-paced fantasy thriller that is a little like Jack Reacher with a sword and some magic.
Someone kidnapped the wrong girl.

Twelve hours ago Raike didn’t even know she existed. Nor would he have cared. That was until the only clue to her kidnapping lay in a cryptic note foretelling her death - a note Raike has seen once before. Now he’s prepared to lose everything to get her back.

Standing in his way is an alliance of two mercenary companies, a city watch who cares more about stopping Raike than finding the missing girl, and an imperial general who had little to fear – until Raike came along.

A gripping fantasy thriller that will keep your heart racing until the very end.
As a thank you to my subscribers I will be sending the first book out for free, so if you haven't subscribed yet and you want to get in on that freebie action then I recommend you click this link before 5 November, because that book will be downloadable for a limited time only.

If you want to read the first chapter, here ya go.

If you want to pre-order it now then you can get it from here.

You can also pre-order book 2.

Last Chance To Win 52 Paperbacks!

Hey folks!

This is your last chance to win 52 sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks for free, 1 for every week of the year!

There are books from Brandon Sanderson, Maggie Stiefvater, Joe Abercrombie, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, J.K. Rowling, and 43 others!

Honestly, if I wasn't allowed to enter (since I'm one of the sponsors, bah!) I'd be on this in a heartbeat.
 
It's free to enter, just click here: CLICK!

Good luck!

I'm not dead!

Seriously, I can't believe it's April already and I haven't posted an update in six months. Long story short: I crashed, finished Kingston 5, re-polished Kingston 1, have been working on re-doing the covers for Kingstons 1 – 5, and wrote another 1.5 books.


Now for the wall of text. You may treat yourself to 1 piece of chocolate guilt-free if you make it to the end.


Things have been a little hectic over the last six months. After the Allure of Fire came out I was determined to take a week off from work, expecting to thoroughly crash after spending 3 months at a frantic pace to get the book done on time. The build up to publishing that book was craaazy. I had settled on a release date months before and even locked it in with Amazon, and once locked in there was no pushing the date back at all. This was an ambitious move since I hadn't even finished writing the story at the time but I was confident that I could. And I did! … with 9 hours to spare. When I set the publish date I expected the book to be 90 – 100,000 words long. It ended up at 126,000. Stay tuned because blowing past my projected word count is a theme in my life.


Those extra words had a knock-on effect. It took longer to write, longer to edit, longer for my editor to read and to do her thing, and longer for me to go through my editor's notes. The resulting madness led to a frantic final few days that looked a lot like an assembly line. My editor marathoned the book as best she could, ignoring life around her and becoming a bleary eyed zombie all so she could help me get this thing done on time. The final two days were nuts. She would hand me the printed chapters with her notes scrawled across while I made the corrections in the next room. I then loaded each of the corrected chapters from my PC onto Vellum (a Mac ebook making program), then paced about while my editor finished the next chapter. Have you ever had someone read over your shoulder? It's annoying as hell, isn't it? How about if it's the author hovering around as you're reading the climax to the book with the pressure of knowing that there's less than 12 hours before it needs to be published?


My editor finished the book at 2am. At 2:20 I had finished the whole thing and loaded it onto Amazon, clicked 'publish' and: success! But only just. If we'd had a power failure I'd have been screwed. If we lost the internet I'd have been screwed. If either my PC or the Mac decided to do a 9 hour update, or if Amazon went down for maintenance, I'd have been screwed. And if my editor came back to me and said: “This ending sucks ...” then I'd have pulled my hair out. Thankfully everything worked out. We finished on time and I promised my editor that I would never put her through that time crunch again.


After that, my supposed 'week off' turned into 'let's get a lot of chores done.' I didn't relax. Instead, I returned to an old project: Kingston Raine and the Lost Angel. I had shelved this book way back in 2015. It's the fifth Kingston book and has been something of a noose hanging around my neck. I was working a full time job while trying to write and edit this monster of book that just wouldn't end. I was also trying to figure out how to be a full time author, complete with advertising, self promotion, and learning all I could about the business side of things. The problem was: I was seriously burnt out. Normally I can write 2,000 words a day without issue, but with this book every 500 words was a challenge. I needed a break. I tried taking a week off, that didn't work. 500 words a day was still a nightmare. I tried taking a month off. That didn't work either. I even edited a completely different book to recharge myself. That didn't work. No matter what I did, I simply hated writing the Lost Angel. I didn't hate the story or the characters, I just hated having to write it. Worse still, the book was 90% done. I was writing and editing at the same time so almost all of it was ready to go, yet I just couldn't go on. So, I did the most painful thing I could think of (aside from deleting the whole thing). I took a year off. Not from writing, just from the Kingston Raine universe. One year turned into two and with a great amount of trepidation I returned to the book a few months ago.


To my surprise it was better than I remembered. Unfortunately the madness surrounding the Allure of Fire (scrambling to finish it in time) caused the inevitable crash. And annoyingly, the crash came when I was 90% of the way into the Lost Angel. Who'd have guessed?


I thought the crash might last for a week. Nope. It lasted for 3 months. I wasn't unproductive during that time, just not as productive as I'd like to have been, like I was stuck in 2nd gear instead of usual 4th.


Nevertheless I plodded along and finished the book. My editor read it and loved it! … except for the ending. The climax was fine. Most of the resolution was fine. It was the last 1,000 words that were a problem. As she has been invested in the Kingston Raine universe for several years already I've taken her annoyance with the ending to heart and that is where I am now: stuck on an appropriate ending. It's left me with a tricky situation. I have a 180,000 word book and everything is fine except for the last 1,000. Sigh.


In case you're wondering what was I doing while my editor was reading the book, I was fixing things that maybe didn't (but they really did) need fixing. To get back into the frame of mind to edit Kingston Raine and the Lost Angel I went back to read the first Kingston book. Normally I'd say that you should never do that, but I had been out of that world for years and I needed a recap on the style, language, and plot points. So I read the original book for research. I found a clunky sentence here and there but I was able to ignore them … until I found a typo. Hoo boy, all it took was one misspelling and I knew I had to go back into the manuscript to fix it. But if I was going to fix that then maybe I could tweak those clunky sentences as well. What began as a simple read-through ended up being a whole new polish of the book, which did not go as quickly as I expected. But by then I was committed to finishing the whole damn thing.


Admittedly, I wasn't entirely thrilled with my editing job when the book first came out. I trimmed a little too much in an effort to make the book as fast a read as possible, but it came at the sacrifice of characterisation. Plus, all the characters seemed to squint and smirk and communicate almost exclusively by raising their eyebrows. Some of what was published now feels awkward and cringe-inducing. Hopefully this will be the last time I ever try to tweak a previously-written book, aside from fixing the inevitable typo that pops up. So that took some time during and after my re-doing of the Lost Angel.


Another problem with the Kingston Raine books is that they don't fit into an easily marketable category. At best they are fantastical magical realism. What does that mean? I have no idea. Either way, with the Lost Angel coming up I needed a cover for that, and while I was working on that I also needed an update on the previous covers because they were letting me down. So it was re-design time! I'm not exactly a quick or gifted photoshopper. I can do a couple of tricks and I can work the shit out of them, but even so it's a time consuming process doing 5 book covers from scratch. I decided to go with 'guy against a colourful background.' Why? Because after years of trying to peddle the Kingston books I felt as though I had seen enough covers to think: 'Screw it! I'm doing something I can actually do!' But I'll tell you something, getting an appropriate Kingston model was a pain in the ass and time consuming process. I have seen more male models and man chest than you'd believe. I have seen more weird results than I'd care for. Eventually I found a reasonable face but not a reasonable body, so I had to start Frankensteining them together. A tedious process. So far I've spent 3 weeks pushing pixels around and I got stupidly bored in the process. But hey, I did get to listen to a lot of podcasts. And I discovered some new music on youtube (Dorothy and Jinjer, for those curious few).


While my editor was still reading the Lost Angel I decided to work on another previously-started series: the adventures of Raike (not its finished title). In January 2017 I felt myself floundering. I was stressing out about the Chimera series since I had blown past my projected word count (me of all people? Noooooo, that's unheard of!) and I needed a quick break. That series had a gazillion characters and plots going on and I wanted something simple to recharge. The solution: Raike – a mercenary for hire in a fantasy world full of magic and bad guys. The story in question: an orphan no one cares about has been kidnapped. The only person who decides to do something about it is a sell-sword who has been ordered not to get involved.


Do you even need to guess what happened? It has something to do with 'word count.' Despite the story taking on a life of its on, I finished it before my editor had finished the Lost Angel, so I got to work on Raike 2. I'm about halfway through now and things are going well. With any luck I'll have that book finish this month and I'll start on Raike 3, then return to the Chimera series. My plan with the Raike series is to sit on them until the first three books are done and then publish them quickly together. It means a bit of waiting around, but hey, I'm trying a new strategy.



Right, enough with the work talk. Tonight is comedy night! I'm in Melbourne, home of the Melbourne Comedy Festival. I've already seen Phil Wang, Stephen K. Amos and David O'Doherty. Tonight: Mark Watson. Later in the week are a couple of free shows. Should be good.

The Allure of Fire is out now!

Finally, we get to see Moqara from the perspective of the 'bad guys'! This part of the epic fantasy saga follows a couple of aristocrats from the empire, sent into the oasis city to stir up some good old fashioned trouble. The book is packed with thievery, intrigue, double-crossing, and a pinch of rampant bloodshed from a new fan-favorite character: Dakahvin.
The time has come for the Empire to strike at the heart of Moqara, and at the Prince himself.

After suffering a humiliating defeat in battle, two aristocratic officers in Carcosa’s army are tasked with a do-or-die mission: sneak into Moqara by whatever means possible, rendezvous with a spy embedded within the region, and recover the godstone hidden beneath the palace.

Aiding them is a bloodthirsty barbarian with the strength of a god, and a merchant closely related to one of Moqara’s most powerful families. How long can they stay undercover before Prince Andraz learns of their mission?

The cold war between Moqara and the Empire has begun.




Get it now from Amazon, Kobo, iTunes, Google Play.


(Promotional hat is now off.)


So what's next for me? Some down time, I think. I have two cats who have practically forgotten the joys of playing with string, I have a hammock and a stack of books that deserve my attention, and I need to get out of the house and see more of the world than just the four walls of my office. I kinda become a full blown hermit in the final stages of writing a book, to the point where sitting down for coffee in a cafe is something of a luxury.



After that? I hope to tackle the fifth Kingston Raine book. It's 90% written and edited, but I crashed three years ago and just couldn't finish it. Now's the time! Maybe. Hopefully. It's been weighing on my mind for all years so I'm going to try my best to dust it off.



Then: back to the Chimera universe, where Kes and Lazden no doubt antagonize each other a little more, Losten and Reina find trouble on their doorstep, and the fallout from The Allure of Fire sends most of those characters running for their lives.

Shadows' Reach, the follow up to A God Among Thieves, is out now!

Apologies for being utterly crap with blogs and updates. I tend to go into full-blown hermit mode in the last stages of getting a book ready for publishing. It's a process not unlike banging your head with a shovel. Repeatedly. And to keep the pressure on, the third book in the series is due out in October (yay! More head banging!).


A quick note: this story (and the next) takes place at the same time as A God Among Thieves and focusses on events happening in and around Moqara. It's all part of a larger world that is about to collide as the empire extends its reach a little too far ...


So, what's this book about?


The land is in crisis.

A diplomat from Tryste arrives in Moqara with the offer of an alliance, only to be arrested for treason before the day is done. As he stands trial, the only man who can speak in his defense is murdered. But did the killer strike to protect a secret or to gain leverage over one of Moqara’s most powerful families?

Reina Dadario, Captain of the Prince’s Guard, hunts for an assassin who was thought to have been executed by the Guard years before. A killer she had arrested herself.

Beyond the border, the neighboring city of Eresdel falls to civil war. As a fanatical new ruler throws the region into unending chaos, Prince Andraz sends a spy to form a resistance, one which needs to act swiftly if it is to challenge the Empire when it arrives. But of all those sworn to obey his every command, what would the Prince have to gain from sending in Reina Dadario’s only son?




Shadows' Reach. Grab it now from your favourite retailer.
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Read Chapter One