Aesyn Cravery's Blog, page 6

TRUST is now available on Amazon

 

TRUST, Book 3 of The Sacrifice series, is now available on Amazon for Kindle and Paperback. I will be posting an excerpt on my Random Shit Nobody Cares About site today, so be sure to check it out.

In the meantime, if you haven't already done so, pick up a copy of books 1 and 2. I would appreciate hearing what you think. Happy reading!

TRUST is finished!

 I finished TRUST, Book 3 of The Sacrifice, this morning. It wasn't as long as I'd hoped, but I did end up with 106k words or about 296 printed pages, and I told the story I wanted to tell, so I'm satisfied with that. I'll take the weekend off, then get it edited and prepped for publishing. Hopefully in the next two weeks I'll have it live on Amazon.

Today's Writing

Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving and are having fun getting ready for the holidays to come.

I'm up to about 78,000 words on Trust, still shooting for a completion this year, but that leaves me a month to finish and I've slowed down considerably as the way forward has become more foggy. I know where I want to end up and I've written the last scene, but getting there from here is proving more difficult. Still have a goal of 120,000 words, which now that I say it, sounds like a lot to get to in one month, though considering I started the book on October 1st, I guess that's about 40,000 words a month. It's totally doable, right?

Progress on Trust

 Progress on Trust, Book 3 of The Sacrifice, is coming along. I'm up to 43,564 words and am on track to finish it before the end of the year, or sooner. I'm shooting for 120,000 words, close to what Trial and Reveal were, though this one is coming slower because I don't have a trek across different realms to fill pages. Just a book of betrayal and trust.

I do have the cover done though.

I just posted an excerpt from Reveal on my Random Shit N...

 I just posted an excerpt from Reveal on my Random Shit Nobody Cares About blog. Head over to check it out.

Progress is still being made on Book 3 of the series, Trust. This morning I'm creating a new monster for Laec to fight. Good times.

Revisiting Old Friends

 Like any writer, I need inspiration. And being an avid reader (when I'm not writing I can read a book a day), I turn to books for a lot of my inspiration. And lately I'm revisiting some of the series that have inspired me in writing my current project, The Sacrifice series. 

Among those are Kate Griffin's (the pen name of Catherine Webb) Matthew Swift books (A Madness of Angels, Midnight Mayor, The Neon Court, and The Minority Council). I love this series, and this author's voice. She's like a marriage of Neil Gaiman and William Faulkner. Her approach to magic is so refreshingly unique, and her prose never fails to inspire me to write more descriptively because sometimes I tend to rush to the action without lingering over the details.

The second series I've started rereading is Rob Thurman's Cal Leandros series. I love the character of Cal Leandros. There's a little of him in Laec, with his snark and badassery. Whenever I find myself straying from Laec's voice, I pick up Rob Thurman and that kind of gives me a course correction.

The third series I'm rereading is M.R. Forbes's Divine series. I love the play between demons and angels here, and Landon Hamilton is an unlikely hero who's been put in an impossible situation, but he's making the most of it. This series was a big inspiration for me when I was plotting out The Sacrifice series and looking at demons and angels in a nontraditional light.

These are the three series that are currently populating my reading list. For most of them, this is my third or fourth (or more) reading of the books, but just like rewatching a favorite movie, I never get tired of rereading a favorite book or series.

REVEAL is Now Available!

 

Reveal, book 2 of The Sacrifice series, is now available on Amazon for kindle and paperback under the author name Aesyn Cravery.

This book took four years to finish because I had lost half of it and had to recreate it from memory. Book 3 is already underway and I promise it won't take as long to complete.

Reveal, The Sacrifice Book 2, Is Done!

 Mercury retrograde is always good for me when I'm writing and it helped me finish Reveal. I was a writing fiend this last week, writing about 70 pages to finish the book today while under a hurricane warning. Woohoo! I didn't think I'd ever finish it since I stopped halfway through it after losing a large chunk in a hard drive crash. I'm already working on scenes for book 3. I know the overall idea for the book, just trying to work out the particulars. In the meantime I'm going to take a few days to bask in the accomplishment.

Trial in Print

 It's been too long, but I'm finally back. I just completed the print version of Trial and it will be live on Amazon Sept 1 (it's there now but the book won't be available till Sept 1). The Sacrifice series is written under the name Aesyn Cravery so it won't be confused with its previous incarnation as The Erebus Files.

I'm currently working on book 2, Reveal, and am about 2/3 of the way through. Originally I had plotted out nine books in this series, and had outlines, overviews, and several chapters for all nine but lost all of that when my hard drive crashed. Now I'm trying to recreate that from memory, and well, memory being what it is these days, that's not an easy thing. I do have some low tech handwritten notes, but deciphering my own handwriting is not as much fun as you'd think, especially since there's no rhyme or reason to the order of entries, just whatever randomly popped into my head at the moment. It's a story I really want to tell, though, so persevere I will.

Emerging from the Depths

It's been too long since I posted on this blog. I could make some excuse that I've been busy, but the truth is, I've been apathetic. I've dealt with severe depression the past few years, and while writing pulled me out of it briefly (enough that I was able to finish the rewrite of Lucid and publish it as Trial under the pen name Aesyn Cravery), but while I had high hopes of publishing book 2 in the new series, The Sacrifice, by the end of last year, that didn't happen. The book is plotted out and three-quarters complete, but a hard drive crash wiped out about one third of the book before I could back it up, which took all the creative wind out of my sails.

I have tried numerous times to jump back into recovering what I lost and finishing the book, entitled Reveal, but something is missing. Maybe it's just my will, but I can't seem to recapture the fire that had me pumping out words at a record pace. Considering the roll I was on, it should have been easy to rewrite everything, but that hasn't been the case. I have gone back to the book time and time again and am still not up to the point I was when I lost everything. I was so excited about this new series, which, when complete, will consist of nine books, all of which are plotted and somewhat outlined. I even had numerous scenes written for them, including the beginning and ending of each book, though much of that was also lost in the hard drive crash.

It's a lesson I should have learned long ago and thought I had a handle on. Back. Up. Often. And I do, at least every couple of weeks. I keep a log of all changes so I know what to back up, but I was on such a roll and writing so prolifically that I lost track of time. Then the day came that I turned on my computer and it wouldn't boot because it couldn't find the hard drive. I tried everything to recover it, but it was hosed and all that work lost. It was like a gut punch. I didn't realize just how much I lost until I started going through what was on my back up drive. Lesson learned. I now not only back up weekly to my portable drive but daily to my Google drive. Redundancy is my mantra now.

I am hoping by putting this out there that it will shame me into choking out my muse and getting her head back in the game. I'm still really excited about this series and love the characters, especially my main character, Laec Matthews. Those of you who read Lucid will remember him, but I tweaked the character, the book, and the premise of the series so much that I felt I had to change everything about it, including the title of both the book and the series, as well as publishing it under a different name so as not to confuse it with its previous incarnation. I published Trial early last summer and allowed it to languish without any promotion due to my mental state. I have no good excuse for that so I won't even bother justifying it. What I will do is ask anyone who hasn't read it to give it a shot. Trial is available exclusively for Kindle on Amazon.