Benjamin Medrano's Blog, page 48

Writing Rambling

With Down with the Queen at the Alpha Team, I’ve been trying to distract myself with other projects and clear my mind. I’ve had additional time in part because two members of my team have been sick or busy, but that’s just how it goes.

That being the case, I’ve worked on two projects so far. In one case, some time ago I mentioned that there was a story I was considering called Ashes of Time. This story has haunted me for years, conceptually, but I was hesitant because in most ways it’s a trag...

February 18th 2018 Update

I’ve sent Down with the Queen to my team of Alpha Readers to have a look at the first draft. Excluding the front matter, story so far, author’s note, and similar material, it’s a bit shy of 101,000 words. This time I’m remembering that a lot of people don’t know how long that is in pages of a book, so let me try to translate. An average page of a book is 250-300 words per page, so assuming 300 the manuscript would be in the neighborhood of 335 pages long.

I should add that a book’s length var...

Character Perspectives

So, this is a bit of an odd post. Having seen a fair amount of praise for Marin’s Codex, one of the things that popped out at me was how some readers really seem to like the limited perspectives in the book. That is something I want to discuss, at least somewhat. I should hasten to add, all of this is my point of view and interpretation. Feel free to disagree with me, because I know that I’m not perfect! Far from it, in fact.

If people aren’t certain what I’m meaning, here’s the essentials of...

February 11th 2018 Update

Down with the Queen is currently at just over 80,000 words, which is only 13,000 shy of what Born a Queen was. With the scenes currently left to the book in my head, I’m expecting to finish the rough draft sometime this coming week, likely with 95,000-105,000 words. I can’t be more precise because I’ve learned I’m pretty bad about estimating actual lengths of a novel.

That being said, assuming I finish at some point this week or early next week, I’ll be going through the book again from the b...

Superpowers in Lilith’s Shadow

I’ve gotten a lot of questions in the Discord chat about the powers in the Stars & Shadows universe, so today I thought I’d go over some of the baseline assumptions that I used when building the universe.

First off, I should point out that one of the things I was adamant about avoiding was what I call the ‘Dragon Ball Z effect’. There’s a threat, the character powers up to defeat it, followed by another even more powerful threat, followed by powering up to meet it… this escalates until you ha...

New Versions

By this point the new version of Born a Queen seems to be live pretty much everywhere that I can see. The audiobook will take some time, but it’s the nature of the business, alas.

That being said, I realized that some of you are going to be stuck with older versions of the files or art. Unless I make fairly massive changes to a book, it doesn’t ‘push’ the new versions out to the readers who already purchased it, to my knowledge, and even deleting and re-downloading the book won’t necessarily...

February 4th, 2018 Update

Down with the Queen is up to ~57,000 words, which means I managed to output about 32,000 words this past week. This is utter insanity for me, as I have no clue what’s driving the writing spree. If I can keep it up, I might be able to release the book a month ahead of when I expect to! However, I’m not counting on it. As it stands, Gina, Lilith, and Rachel are having a hell of a month.

With all of this in mind, I’m very happy to also add that I’m going to be updating the cover of Born a Queen...

Art & Games

So, like I’ve mentioned a number of times, I’ve been planning to put out an omnibus of the Ancient Dreams trilogy this year. So everyone is aware, it will not just be me copying pasting the three books into a single whole. To do so would be somewhat disrespectful to all of you, and to the books themselves, at least in my opinion.

When I begin work on the omnibus, I’m going to start by including the Halls of Power Extended Ending. I freely admit I wrapped up the book a little too quickly, and...

January 28th 2018 Update

This past week I got a ton of work done on Down with the Queen, increasing the word count to ~25,000 words, over 50% more than I usually would’ve done in a week. Normally I have a hard time getting going on a story, but on this one I just hit the ground running. Whether that’s because I had a good idea of what I wanted, or simply because I was ready to work on it, I’m not certain.

Regardless, book 2 of Lilith’s Shadow is coming along well. If I can keep this up, we likely will see the book re...

Problems with Marin’s Codex

No, not formatting or typos, to my knowledge. Instead, when I set up the book I did everything I could to make sure it was in Kindle Unlimited and everything else. Unfortunately, at launch it didn’t enroll the books in KU. This means that plenty of people may be disappointed, and I want to apologize if you’re among them. I’ve hit the enroll button and contacted Amazon, but I want to state that this was unintentional. I was wondering why I hadn’t gotten as many pages read overnight, and it exp...