Benjamin Medrano's Blog, page 60

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...

Paperback is live!

Using the picture from the copy I got!

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Amazon Store

March 26th Update

So, all but one beta reader have gotten back to me with feedback on Spells of Old. I’ve been going through and polishing some of the chapters, fixing minor issues in the process, but there hasn’t been anything major that’s needed to be changed. The worst was a missing word. As I told people before, I’ve scheduled the editor, and they’re going to be working on the book as of the 5th of April, but I’m going to send it to them on the 1st, assuming there isn’t anything big I need to fix. I doubt...

Ancient Ruins Proof!

So, I got the proof copy of Ancient Ruins!

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I would’ve taken pictures of the interior, but all my pictures turned out blurry (I don’t have the steadiest of hands). I only have a single issue, in that my name and the title on the interior at the top of each page isn’t centered, and is instead left-aligned. I’m trying to decide whether it’s worth delaying the book for several days while they go through it again. Decisions, decisions.

Edit: Oh, and I put up a Religion page for explaining some...

Artwork & Future Books

First off, I have hereby commissioned the cover for Halls of Power. I’m looking forward to seeing how Jackie does with it, and hope it turns out wonderful. Not spoiling anything there, you have to wait for it to be finished.

I’ve also been in contact with another artist, and at the end of the month intend to test out her art style by getting a portrait of Sistina, since I think that she’s the most complex main character of the books. If the artist does well, I may get portraits of other chara...

Spells of Old Draft 2

I went ahead and grabbed a few people from my mailing list to read through the second draft of Spells of Old. Out of them, I’ve had three responses thus far, and they’ve been largely favorable, though there have been a handful of errors that I’ve corrected thus far.

I’m waiting for a little more feedback, but I’ll probably be starting on a second round of editing of Spells of Old tonight, focusing mostly on character names and perspective shifts. All of this assumes I can concentrate while my...

Why I don’t Write Horror

Or, to be more accurate, why my wife forbids me from writing horror. The reason for this is that apparently yesterday I hit, ever so briefly, the top 100 horror authors on Amazon. This amuses me, since Ancient Ruins was given the categories of Dark Fantasy and Lesbian Romance by me. Apparently, if you put a book in Dark Fantasy, Amazon often categorizes it as horror anyway. I mentioned this to my wife, and she approximately said: “Hun, I love you, but if you write actual horror? I’m not readi...

Second Draft Complete

My first full editing pass of spells of Old is complete. It’s a much cleaner manuscript than Ancient Ruins was, but that doesn’t mean its acceptable yet. I’m going to be passing it back to my second-draft readers shortly, but I wanted to let everyone know where it stood.

Also, as a complete aside, I’m chagrined to realize that I haven’t been using my site properly. A large number of comments were being flagged as spam, and I only realized this last night. 36 comments were permanently deleted,...

March 19th Update

As I said yesterday, two of my three first-draft readers have finished Spells of Old, and the last is ill, so I went ahead and started editing it. Including both the Prologue and Epilogue, Spells of Old is 58 chapters, and is sitting at approximately 123,500 words in length. I fully expect this will fluctuate somewhat, however.

Last night I finished editing through Chapter 7. I hope to get at least halfway through the remainder today. All of this is the good news.

Now for the bad news. The ed...

Updates and Randomness

So, two of the three main readers of Spells of Old have finished it. The third is, in his words, ‘down with the plague’, so I’m not going to be waiting for him to finish before starting editing. Most of the complaints were about abrupt endings to chapters. I’ve fixed several of them, and added about 3k words with some additional text actually detailing the personalities of the Jewels via interaction.

Second, I finally found how I screwed up so badly on the original Epilogue of Ancient Ruins a...