Benjamin Medrano's Blog, page 60

April 9th Update

I’ve updated the release date of Spells of Old to Saturday, April 15th, and uploaded the final version of the book. It’s ready as it’s ever going to be.

Those of you on my mailing list when I sent out my email about the ARC possibilities. You have until I wake up Monday to sign up to have a chance at the list. I intend to send out the ARCs on Monday, so this is your only warning.

The physical book is going to be available by the time Spells of Old launches, and I’m working on getting things s...

Spells of Old: Edited

I have Spells of Old back from my editor, and am going through it now. That’ll take me most of tonight to go through the line-edits. After that I’m going to do a full read of the book. As soon as I’m satisfied, I’m going to update the release date and upload the final version of Spells of Old as a pre-order.

Assuming I don’t lose internet for the entire time between now and Monday, Spells of Old will be released on April 15th.

I should also have the print version available at about the same t...

Writing Difficulties

So, despite starting Halls of Power on Monday, I’d been having a hard time writing it. I’ll admit that part of it has been my wife being out of work. That’s stressful, and her being in the same room… well, let’s just say that there’s a reason why I tended to get most of my writing done during the week. Any distractions can shut me down. But even that wasn’t explaining all of it. That’s when I realized what the problem was.

When I started Spells of Old, I had written up about a 2 page outline...

Commissioned Art

So, I got another piece of art commissioned. The picture was of Sistina, as I considered her the most complex of the major characters in Ancient Ruins. The artist is IndyMBras, and she created the art for significantly less than she should have, as she’s trying to build up a reputation at the moment. With no further ado, here it is.

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Now, the picture isn’t perfect. Nothing matches my imagination perfectly. Her lips are a touch too thick for my taste, for one, and the face isn’t perfect… but i...

A Sense of Scale

Something that I’ve often pondered as I’ve worked on my books is how to get across the sense of the scale of different things, in particular the mountains. It’s difficult, and something I have struggled with. Especially for my international audience who has less of a grasp of what feet and inches are. Yes, I think America should convert to Metric, but I grew up with feet, inches, and miles. It makes it interesting. Anyway, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the scale of things.

I grew up in U...

April 2nd Update

I don’t have too much to update people on today. Yesterday, having gotten what feedback I could from the beta readers and finished editing, I sent Spells of Old off to my editor. I should have it back by next Sunday, which will allow me to go through it and make sure I agree with all the changes. Assuming everything goes as planned, Spells of Old may be available late next week. But I can’t make any promises, I’m afraid.

Amusingly, the audiobook of Ancient Ruins may be available in a similar...

Not April Fools

On a theoretical level, I don’t mind April Fools jokes to a minor degree. I utterly despise them when they involve more than a single particular person. You’ll never get them from me on a huge scale. That’s why I’m not going to make a joke. Instead, I’m putting up the rest of the rough draft of Spells of Old. So there’s a link for those of you not on my mailing list.

Furthermore, if people interested in what sort of artwork I like, here’s a link to my Deviantart favorites page. It isn’t exhau...

Series Length

So, yesterday I was chatting with my wife, and the subject of the length of various series came up when I was talking about ideas for after the Ancient Dreams trilogy. She was the one who recommended that I put my thoughts up here.

When I come up with stories, I come up with a trilogy or a single story. Oh, the trilogy might have plot hooks that could be used to launch a separate trilogy about the same characters, or relatively minor characters in a book, but each trilogy is intended to close...

Halls of Power Cover

I got the artwork for Halls of Power earlier today, and promptly turned it into the cover in preparation! Sharing it below.

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Ups & Downs

Things have been an exhilarating ride since I published. It’s weird to me. But life has its ups and downs. I’m glad that I finished going through Spells of Old again yesterday morning, because in the afternoon I found out that my wife’s company decided to remove the entire Network team in favor of an outside vendor. They gave a decent severance, so we aren’t in bad shape, and I’m certain she can find a new job easily enough (Network Security Engineer), but it makes things weird for me. My inc...