Jordon Quattlebaum's Blog, page 2

Breakdown: Season 2 Cover!

Just a quick peek at the cover design for Season 2 of Breakdown. I think J Caleb at jcalebdesign.com nailed it once again. What do you think? Look for Episode 6 soon!

Breakdown: Season 2 cover!

Finished!

The first ‘Running on Empty’ story is off to the editors!

The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the sun never shines, and terrible things wait in the darkness. The only safe havens are small townships and larger ‘Citadels’ that have been partially or completely walled off.

Information travels slowly between towns, and like a game of ‘telephone’, the further you go from the source, the more suspect the tale.

This story follows two couriers (think pony express in a Mad Max world), Preacher and Ghost, who are a bit down on their luck.

Down to less than a quarter tank of gas, they take on a job from a stranger that winds up being a bit more than they can chew…

 

Look for ‘Running on Empty: Tape #1′ soon.

 

In other news, the first season (episodes 1-5) of Breakdown are now available in paperback! Check it out here. If you’ve already read these episodes, do me a favor and leave a review. They really help!

 

Happy Saturday,

Jordon

Free Book Give Away!

That’s right, I’m giving away a signed copy of my Post-Apocalyptic Adventure, “Breakdown” to one of my lucky email subscribers!

Wait.. you haven’t signed up yet?

Good news…

Breakdown Give Away!

It’s not too late!

Just sign up by May 17th, and you’ll be entered to win. The winner will be notified early next week. Good luck!

Sneak Peak: Running On Empty Cover!

I apologize for not having posted in awhile. My dayjob has suddenly clicked into an obscenely busy mode, and it’s been a struggle to keep up with everything. Something had to give temporarily and I’m sure you’d rather it be the blog than the new stories!

So, all of that being said, I’ve been hard at work writing about 1,500 words per day this month so far. To put that in perspective, my previous pace had been about 500 words a day from January-April. All of this means more stories for you.

I’m very nearly finished with the first ‘Running on Empty’ story, featuring two characters, Preacher and Ghost, that will be reoccurring in other stories. I’m terribly excited about this one, and wanted to give you a sneak peak at the cover to hopefully get you excited as well! It’ll be a bit longer than the ‘Breakdown’ episodes. How long? That’s still a bit up in the air, but best guess at this point is between 70 and 80 pages.

Without further ado, here she is:

Don’t Stop. Never Yield.

Great Weekend at C2E2!

I had the honor of joining Dapper Press (@DapperPress) this weekend in Chicago for the C2E2 conference.

It was amazing to meet so many wonderful people and talk books, comics and cosplay!

I’m home again in Kansas City, and while it’s wonderful to be home with my wife and daughters again, I can honestly say I will miss the people I met this weekend, and the city that hosted me.

Thank you C2E2, thank you Dapper, thank you Chicago….and most of all, thank you readers.

Cheers!

Two of the amazing cosplayers I got to meet at C2E2 Saturday in Chicago.

Wonderful Weekend

I had the honor of joining Dapper Press (@DapperPress) this weekend in Chicago for the C2E2 conference.

It was amazing to meet so many wonderful people and talk books, comics and cosplay!

I'm home again in Kansas City, and while it's wonderful to be home with my wife and daughters again, I can honestly say I will miss the people I met this weekend, and the city that hosted me.

Thank you C2E2, thank you Dapper, thank you Chicago....and most of all, thank you readers.

Cheers!

Running on Empty

For the last decade I’ve been blessed to be friends with a wonderful guy named Jamie Lindemann. Mr. Lindemann is an extremely talented, ‘jack of all trades’ sort of individual. We met in college through a shared passion for tabletop gaming, and ended up rooming together our senior year. During the tenure of our friendship I’ve seen Jamie design countless board games and card games, but the thing that most impressed me with Jamie’s creative endeavors were the worlds that he built.

It’s my pleasure to announce that I’ll be writing several upcoming short stories for a setting he’s created called ‘Running on Empty’. It’s a wonderful ‘what if’ setting that mixes up a good dose of ‘Mad Max‘, with a dash of ‘Pitch Black‘, and a spoonful of ‘Supernatural‘. The first short story, “Preacher and Ghost: Tape #1” should be available sometime during the month of May. It will be a stand-alone story , roughly 50-60 pages in length, with a fully developed beginning, middle and end. Not a serial, like ‘Breakdown’.

I’ve taken a snippet of the actual tabletop rulebook and copied it below.

My granddad used to tell me, when I was a kid, about a time when we didn’t have the sunlights. When we actually had a real sun shining on us, and a million stars, and other planets in the sky. The air was a clear blue, and everybody walked around in the warm season with it just streaming down on them. And that they hated it. How hot it was, how bright it was… Careful what you wish for, I guess.

We join the story almost eighty years after the Great Eclipse, when generations of survivors have grown up without the sun, with their days being a dusky murk over their long, cold nights. Generations before, the nation’s scientists were set with an unavoidable dilemma: We were on a collision course with a Doomsday-level celestial object. A direct impact on this scale would end life as we know it, plunging us into a nuclear winter thousands of years long, plenty long enough to snuff out life on Earth. As the event loomed closer, two camps emerged: One who argued that the event would miss us by fractions, on a celestial scale, others who continued to dispute the calculations and point out that death was only a few years away. Both were wrong.

It has been said that the impact did more than shatter the earth, but in fact opened a hole through the world, figuratively speaking. No one has been recorded as going and seeing what things are like in Asia, but whispers abound that a great rift was opened in the world and all manner of evil came out. A lot of that talk is endtime-flavored crazy, but the world has never been the same since the sun went out. Since then, some Citadels have declared sovereignty over the surrounding regions, usually no more than thirty miles out due to the limits of radio technology and the absence of satellites. Some communities put themselves in indentury to maintain the double-wide banks of sunlamps which keep our crops growing around the calendar, eight hours at a time. Others waited, trembling fearfully with no news from the darkness, until their power plants gave out and in one moment were plunged into a Stygian nightmare they could never wake up from. This is a recipe for disaster. This is the story’s beginning. This is home. Welcome to the Long Night.

Episode 5

I have the pleasure of letting you know that Episode 5 of ‘Breakdown’ was completed today. It’s about 10 pages longer than any of the other episodes, but it wraps up the remainder of the season nicely.

It’s off to the editor, and once the edits are complete, up it goes.

 

Thanks so much for reading so far. It’s absolutely been a thrill to be able to entertain so many of you.

Moving Forward

Episode 5 is wrapping up, and I’m thrilled to let you know that this will be the conclusion of the first season. That’s right, I’ve been able to hit all of the plot points I planned on hitting for the first season! Wahoo!

What does this mean?

Well, it means that I’ll get started on Season 2. I also have another setting that I’ll be writing for called ‘Running on Empty’ that I’m majorly excited about. More on that next week!

Throughout the process I’ve listened to my readers and have decided, based on your feedback, to increase the length of future episodes to roughly 12.5k words (from my 10k word minimum). I hope that this will create a better reading experience and make you all that much happier to read what I’m writing.

Thanks so much for giving me the pleasure of writing for you.

-Jordon

Episode 4 Available Now!

Episode 4 of ‘Breakdown’ is available now on amazon. Click the image below and you’ll be taken straight to it. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it!

Episode 4 is available on Amazon now!