M.B. Aznoe's Blog, page 3

Pressing on!

Getting this check in up before Tuesday ends. I guess you’d say this week was a breakthrough week. We swapped a few characters plots around and I think the result has been much better. It solved many plot holes we were struggling with. Still plowing through this draft with our eyes on the end. I think we are nearly halfway there though and once we hit the edits, things go so much faster.

As for interesting things in our life, we are slowly easing back into ministry. We joined the worship team at our church and are enjoying it immensely. Still haven’t gotten back into songwriting yet, but hopefully one day soon! In close, I will put up a new (rough) map that we are working on. M. is hoping to get this done in his normal, hand-drawn format before the next book comes out.

Tuesday Check-in (One day late)

I completely forgot to do a Tuesday check-in yesterday, but better late than never, right? We are plugging right along through book 5. I think we’ve managed to get in 4 or 5 chapters this past week. The book at this point still feels rough to us though. We have many author notes, some even simply saying “add description here”, but that is drafting for you. The important thing is to keep pressing ahead and crafting the story. I will say, we both are excited about the story and the direction our characters are driving us in the plot.

And speaking of characters, we met a fun character a few weeks back. We decided that since we live in an area known for manatees, we ought to go see them, so we went to a local state park that hosts wild manatees in season. In addition to hosting manatees, this park also is home to many creatures who cannot be released into the wild for various reasons and is almost like a zoo. The picture below is a character who lives there named Lu. He looks nothing like what M. or I even imagined our Lu to look like, but I found him absolutely adorable nonetheless.

Tuesday Check In

I know we have not been very good about blogging, so I am going to create a new blog series called the “Tuesday Check Ins”. I’m hoping to give a brief update on where we are at in our writing and whatever else I think might be interesting.

This book has come more slowly then either of us had hoped. On the face of it, we expected it to just fall into place. We had the end picture. We had a bunch of pieces. It should have been easy. However, the hardest part has been balancing action and storytelling. Some of the pieces we thought were awesome had to be thrown out. Others did not fit where we thought they would. And still more pieces were dumped in. We’ve drafted, drafted, and drafted again, each one I think was getting stronger than the last. Now we are nearly half-way into our current draft. This morning, a chapter wasn’t working, so we took a step back, plotted things forward, and swapped characters for that chapter. But we didn’t have to go backward. It’s progress!

In light of this week being holy week for those of us in the Christian church, I want to leave off with a graphic of a song from Jyrya. It was one we wrote for their Good Friday service. With all of the darkness in our world, it’s easy to lose sight of the light, and yet Christ is still there, inviting us to come into His presence, if we would just turn to Him.

Reflections

As we begin to write Illisya, we’ve been confronted with a question that crops up in everyone’s life: Why do bad things happen? And its partner: Why is it that when we follow God’s leading, we experience times of trouble? As we said in our previous post, the past few years have been really hard. It has seemed as though it was just one trial after another, and that we had to face it alone. Many days it was hard to find the willpower just to get up in the morning, much less accomplish anything. Now, from where we sit in our new home in Florida, we are beginning to see a book take shape with lessons beyond what we imagined in our original concepts. While we still don’t know why things have turned out the way they did, nor may we ever completely understand, we are seeing a glimmer of hope in our writing. A verse that has stood out to us in the past month is Psalm 37:24 ~ Even if he trips, he will not fall headlong, for the Lord holds his hand. ~

We are several chapters into Illisya, but it is still too early to pinpoint a release date for it. One thing we don’t want to do is to rush a book to print that doesn’t have a the quality we desire. We thank you for your patient support.

I will leave you all with a song M. wrote many years ago that sums up where we have been, and while the heavens haven’t opened up, it’s beginning to sprinkle.

Back in Action!

You may have noticed that we haven’t been posting much this past year. It has been a difficult year with a lot of personal challenges that have made writing impossible. However, God has been faithful and is now opening up new opportunities for us this year to enable us to once again resume work on the Swordflower Saga!

We will make every effort to keep you updated here and in our newsletter as progress is being made, but our goal is to complete book 5 by the end of the year. Thank you all so much for your prayers and support.

(Below is a concept photo for Illisya.)

Tentative cover photo for Illisya.

Hardcovers now available

All of the books in the Swordflower Saga are now available in hardcover. Order your copies today!

Jyrya Is Live!

We are excited to announce that Jyrya is now available for sale on Amazon. Please click here to order your copy today!

Pre-order Jyrya today!

Here’s the pre-order link to the kindle edition of Jyrya. It will go live on March 20th for those who want a paperback edition or are using Kindle Unlimited. Having just finished our last revision, we are in the process of editing clean-up and are excited to share this book with our readers.

Cover Reveal!

Take a look at this gorgeous cover done by oliviaprodesign from Fiverr. We’re aiming to release the book next month so keep an eye out for the pre-order link coming the end of this week.

Jyrya is coming!

We just got our cover design for Jyrya, and it looks fantastic! Look for a cover reveal next week along with preorder information (kindle only, of course). However, here’s the blurb that will be on the back.