M.B. Aznoe's Blog

It’s been a while…

I had to double check when I realized it had been nearly 6 months since I had last blogged. We have been so busy, the days have flown by. Trying to squeeze in writing time has been challenging enough, let alone blogging. We have managed to get a good ways into the first book of our new series The Watersong Saga. It’s undergone many changes as we have worked to make the side-plot lines work even as our original macro-plot remains unchanged. It’s been fun writing a new generation and thinking of all of the challenges that they might face.

We have also started our audiobook for Elvensty! It’s been a learning curve for me but fortunately there are a lot of resources out there to help out. We’d love a little feedback on what I’ve done thus far, so if any of you want to take a listen, send us a note. I’ve gotten 5 chapters done thus far, however, we’ve hit summer camp season so I’ll be busy shuttling kids about for the next few weeks. Hopefully, I’ll be able to resume working on the audiobook after that.

In closing, I’d like to share a song that we included in our prologue. I hope it encourages you to seek the Diamond in the rain, the hope of Jesus who is calling for His children to come home. This song was actually recorded by M. years ago when he was in his first band (before I had even met him!). To hear the full song, click here.

A Quick Update

First off, I want to remind everyone that we do have a discord server. A few of you have joined us there and even posted some fan art – thanks Charlesss. We have a few other posts like what M. and I are reading, and some concept art for our new series. We’d love to see you over there and hear what you’re reading as well! You can either use your web browser or app to access our server, but you will have to set up a free account with discord at https://discord.com and verify your email using their instructions. Once you’ve set up your account, you should be able to copy this link https:/ /discord. gg/ dEv3j4jV with spaces removed into your browser and accept our invitation to join our server.

Writing on The Watersong Saga has been going well. We don’t envision them being quite as long page-wise as The Swordflower Saga books nor have as many books in the series. Currently, we are thinking three books given the content we have, but we’ll see as we get closer to the finish of this book. We’re going to be updating our maps for this series and making a few family trees. We’ll be posting those on discord as we get them completed. Much has changed in our world, and the maps will reflect the changes in borders while the family trees will connect the dots between the characters you know from The Swordflower Saga and the relevant ones in The Watersong Saga. And yes, that was another plug for our new server. Hope to see some of you over there!

Discord Server

We are excited to announce the launch of our new Discord server, The Sword and Bear Cafe!

What is Discord?

Discord is a free social media application that allows communication through text, voice, and even video. Designed originally for the video game community to talk during play, it has expanded to become a all-purpose platform for people who want to connect and easily share information with their friends away from noisy sites like Facebook and X (Twitter). It is available on almost every platform in existence including smart phones with both a browser-based interface and downloadable apps. For more information, go here.

Why the move?

One of the problems we are finding with social media in general is that many of our posts are hidden or just lost in all of the noise. Even our contact us page on our website is regularly spammed with hundreds of emails daily. We know we have been really late in responding to some of your notes, and we are truly sorry for that. We are hoping that using discord will help with that kind of issue as a Discord server is a dedicated area for us to connect with you, our fans.

What are our plans for the new server?

Our goal is to open up more conversations with you all, so please come say hello, post questions, and even recommend other books by clean or Christian authors that you think would appeal to fans of The Swordflower Saga. M. and B. are readers too, and we’d love to be introduced to some new reading material! We have set up channels for chatting about various topics and would eventually like to see our server expand to include other authors as well. We have a voice channel where we hope to have live interactions with you all and even do interviews with other authors.

How do I get started?

In order to protect the new server from spammers, we require a verified email address to set up an account. Discord is free, and they don’t spam your account or sell your information to others. There is also a short tour to help get you up and running in the new interface if you are unaccustomed to Discord. This will protect us all from inappropriate posts and spam.

Also, there is a sneak peek in the Watersong Saga channel with some concept art for our new series. Come check it out!

Invite link to copy (remove the spaces): htt ps:// discord.gg/ 5HTGhtNt

Christmas Is Here Again

And once again, I’m late in posting. I feel as though we have been running nonstop, but when I look back, we are simply running in place. Christmas came early to our house as we had to set it around family who no longer live at home. It’s funny how life changes as children move away and start their own separate lives. You would think we would have more time, but somehow it seems like less since there are so many more schedules to manage. I begin to understand why my mom said she was more busy than ever when my dad retired. However, we keep pressing on, adapting to whatever God brings to us. Praise God that He is always there to help us, or we would have fallen apart a long time ago!

We’re looking ahead to the New Year, and we have a few new, exciting things we are looking to venture into.

First, we are going to be starting up a Discord server at the beginning of the New Year. For those who don’t know, Discord is a forum app that allows both text and voice chat. There are many reasons for this move, but the biggest one is that this will allow better direct communication between us and our fans. There will be more information on this soon.

We are also looking into the feasibility of setting up our own webstore. Many of you have been asking us if you can buy signed book copies, and we really want to be able to offer this service to you. We will keep you updated on the particulars of this as we need to figure in shipping costs and see what we will need to charge. We’re hoping to offer as good of a deal as Amazon (or better!).

We have had many of you asking if we would ever make an audiobook of The Swordflower Saga. Well, we are excited to announce that the answer may soon be a “yes!” We are actively pursuing recording Elvensty for an audio release. We will keep you posted as we get further along in this process.

Finally, we have gotten a jump on writing the next series: The Watersong Saga. We are aiming for a November/December of 2025 release date for the first book: Where River And Shadows Meet. We’ll be posting some of the concept art on our new Discord server, so be sure to check it out when it becomes available.

Merry Christmas to all of you! We hope you have a blessed time with family or friends.

Halloween

As I was thinking of what to post for today, I thought of the two things Halloween always brings to my mind. The first one is autumn especially here in Montana where the air has already grown colder and the leaves are quickly falling from our trees into our yard. Interestingly enough, in our book world, they don’t have autumn. As we looked into the two sun cycle and how it would impact the world, the air would grow cold so quickly when the suns cycled during the Crossing that at most they would have a week of what we consider autumn. We make a mention of the falling leaves in Elvensty but there isn’t much there to post about since snow comes so quickly to their world.

So I looked at my second idea – costumes- and found much more to work with. Costumes are used to disguise ourselves or make us feel like someone we aren’t. Often they are something or someone we admire and wish we could be like. They are trying to mask our real self, to reroute attention from our identity. In our books, Lu disguises himself in Dalmain to appear more Jyrye so he won’t stand out in Yyron. In Jyrya, Kintrye assumes a whole new persona as he works on his investigation for the king of Jyrya while the infamous Masquerade of the Hiding is all about deception. In our latest work-in-progress, I found this clip that I wanted to share with you all. Our heroine, Echohanna, is forced to disguise herself to mask her true identity as the missing princess of Lanmach, and her friend, Kassea, helps her to make it happen.

Three Weeks On

It’s hard to believe it has been three weeks since Illisya released. Since then we have been busy working out the plot points of the next series: The Watersong Saga. It’s been a fun but challenging proposition. By moving 32 years into the future in the same world, we have to do a lot of plotting about what happened in between the two series. I even started using a timeline program to keep track of everything. It’s amazing how much can happen in 32 years!

We have one big announcement: we have updated all the interiors of our books. M. went through all the maps and darkened them to make everything a bit more legible, and a friend of ours went through each of the first four books and made a few extra edits which are now incorporated into these files. With the help of a new program called Atticus as well as my graphic art program Canva, we have cleaned up the fonts, added chapter and scene break images, and now have nice little touches like drop caps. The other nice thing for us is that now we have one master file that we can export into each version we need. Before we had a hardback file, a softcover file, and an ebook file so when we had to do edits we had update each file individually. Needless to say, we didn’t edit unless absolutely necessary. Now we just update one main master file which makes life so much easier. You can see the results in the screenshots below. It’s been fun working on the images, and I already have one in mind for the next series which I will hopefully share in a few weeks. Until then, we hope you are enjoying the conclusion of the Swordflower Saga!

Release Day!

Illisya is now available on Amazon! Get your copy today.

Four More Days!

Four more days until Illisya comes out. On our side, everything is done. We had a hard deadline set by Amazon to get all of our changes in by last Saturday so now we are just awaiting release day! We did post the new sound clips for Illisya, so feel free to check it out here. It does come with a spoiler warning, however, since you might find a few characters you didn’t expect to see.

Many of you have asked what our plans are now that Illisya is done. At the moment, we’re busy catching up all the housework we let slide in our mad dash to get everything done in time. And unpacking boxes. And rearranging the garage. But we do intend to keep on writing! You’ll find a bit of a blurb for our planned next series The Watersong Saga in the back of Illisya. More details on that to come at a later date!

For now though, here is look at our new bookmarks for Illisya.

Illisya is coming!

And now the moment you’ve all been waiting for! The Illisya cover reveal.

Preorder your copy today! Ebook link here. We will put up the paperbacks as soon as they become available on Amazon.

Unexpected Changes

Tech is hard to get right. I’ve been going through and updating a lot of our graphics with the help of a few new tools. It’s been fun, however, today it took a dark turn. I was looking into website updates when I clicked the wrong button. The website went down hard, taking half of our pages with it. Fortunately, it was a matter of turning things back on, but still there was much panic. But the upside is that our webpage has been updated with a new look and feel. I was planning to wait until after our next book release, but it seems God had other plans.

In book news, we are hoping to send off for the cover after this edit. Then we are going to try to blitz edit over the weekend of the 4th. We are also hoping to get some sound clips together for the few new characters and places we have put in. The nice thing is that most everything is already covered so it makes our work easier. Looking beyond this book, we intend to keep on writing and have a few ideas turning in our minds for the next series. It will likely be in the same world, but we are hoping to explore new areas we didn’t visit in The Swordflower Saga. For now, we are staying focused on our current book. Keep an eye out for a cover reveal, hopefully coming soon!