Hieronymus Hawkes's Blog, page 7

In High Cotton

I’m in Oklahoma working for a few weeks, teaching at the KC-135 school house, and this wonderous sight is right next to my hotel. I always seem to arrive here after the harvest but these pics were taken mere days before they harvested them. My new iPhone 13 took some nice photos.

A little musical interlude to interrupt your day

I love the Black Keys. I am away for work and this song popped up on my iTunes Library in my rental car and I kept it on recycle for quite awhile.

Rick Beato Interviews Myles Kennedy and it’s Awesome!

I love both of these guys. Their musical knowledge is pretty incredible and they share a snippet with us in this amazing interview. Myles is the lead singer of my favorite band, Alter Bridge, and also fronts for Slash with the Conspirators. If you don’t follow Rick’s channels on YouTube you are missing out.

Writing Update

On old start of a cover I tried to make.

I can’t remember how much I’ve said about my current WIP. It’s a space opera, with the theme of Vampires in Space.

I just passed 18,000 words on Book 2 in the Mészárosa Trilogy, Salvāre. The first book, Vim Dicaré is all but done, including the cover, just a few tweaks left and another round of final line edits with Lauren. But I plan to finish all three of these books before I publish. The writing is going a little slower than I would like. Not because I am struggling with it, it is pretty well outlined, but I am laboring to put my butt in the seat and actually write. That is the real challenge I’m facing. I want this for a career and adding words has been a slough. Makes me wonder if I have what it takes.

I’m not interested in filling my time with video games any more. The writing is always there, and I never regret the time I spend doing it, but there always seems to be fifty other things that need attending, or —

squirrel!

I’m easily distracted. I have all of the covers done for the, a plan in place, a wonderful editor that gets me, all I have to do it write the damned books. I am hoping to really focus on writing over the next two months. I would love to have it finished before the end of the year. It is doable, but will require diligence and perseverance.

I want to publish all three next year.

I hope your writing is going better!

Here is a little taste. This is raw and unedited and might not even make it into the final copy:

The behemoth cargo starship Rougarou moved into the open maw of the quantum gate and in a flash, it disappeared from realspace, swallowed up by the receding wave of energy. In front of the ship, a tunnel led them forward through netherspace, bucking slightly as the ship settled in front of the energy wave like a surfer on the North Shore of Oahu. René Trahan had never seen such a wave, but it was how the story had been passed down through the ages, as the Trahans had been merchant traders on Earth when ships sailed the oceans, and they were one of the first to take up the space lanes after the quantum tunnels had been opened. But this wave was invisible to the eye and only a practiced helmsman could maneuver with such a soft touch that the ripples from the wave smoothed out so quickly that not even a cup of water was spilled in the ship.

Blog Tour Begins today for Effacement!

Blog Tour Kick Off: Effacement

The gals over at the Book Review Crew are doing a blog tour for my book Effacement that will run through the coming week. Please go check it out and their other reviews.

Effacement is Out in Audio!

I’m very excited to announce that the audio version is available today at Google Play, Chirp, and Authors Direct!

More will be coming as they process the files. It should be available soon wherever you download your audiobooks.

Henry and Jenna did a wonderful job! This is more like an audio play, since they do all the voices, male and female, and narrate the appropriate sections as well. I hope you enjoy it!

Preview for Effacement Audiobook!

The audiobook should be out September 28th! It’s is narrated by Henry Kramer and Jenna Doulong and they did all the male and female voices for the book, so it’s kinda cool. He narrated the male POV and she narrated the female POV. I think it turned out pretty damned well.

If his name sounds familiar, he is the son of two prominent audiobook readers, two of my all-time favorites, Kate Reading and Michael Kramer. I feel fortunate to get in early on what is surely going to be a spectacular career for both Henry and Jenna!

I hope you like it! It will be available wherever you buy your audiobooks in 13 days!

Wolf Van Halen is Extremely Talented

I saw his band, Mammoth WVH last week in Indy and they were quite good. the only negative I would say is that they had the bass up too loud and it drowned out a lot of the nuance. WVH is an amazing talent and played every instrument on every song on his debut album. I can’t wait to see what the future hold for this music prodigy.

It’s Book Award Season

I submitted for maybe half a dozen book awards. I’ve heard back from three so far and I made the cut in one that is still going. I made finalist in another but didn’t win.

And today I found out I won  National Association of Book Entrepreneurs Summer 2021 Best Science Fiction Book!

This is their 39th year doing book awards by category. It’s always rewarding to get recognized for the effort.

I have to say I am quite pleased with how Effacement turned out. The reviews have been generally great, and best of all nobody has said I suck at writing and should stop. That was my biggest fear.

Imposter syndrome is real.

If you haven’t checked out the novel you can see it here: Effacement

Hope you are well despite everything!

Just ruminating a bit about where I am in my life. I retired after a 32 year career flying jets for the Air Force and Reserves just over 3 years ago and embarked on a new journey as a simulator instructor and writer.

A little more than a year ago my wife of 28 years passed from a recurrent case of breast cancer that was caught much too late.

In the time since then my life has changed dramatically. I met my soulmate. This takes nothing away from my late wife. We had a wonderful marriage and raised four kids together, but we were very different people. She was very solitary and loved being at home with the family. She loved peace and quiet and working out. She loved our kids and our dogs, but we were getting to place where our kids were grown and we would have been empty nesters. She was a brilliant person and could focus on something without getting bored better than anyone I have ever met, but she struggled with being out in public.

My new life accomplice is an amazing person, and also a widow, that shares so many things in common with me it is almost spooky. We joke that we were married to the same person, one that would rather stay home and do something quiet. But honestly that is not us. We love music and we like it loud. We love to travel and adventure and see live music and we are doing that together, and despite the restrictions that came with COVID, it has been wonderful. Something I didn’t think I would have in my life ever again. She even got me to do karaoke for the first time last weekend!

My youngest daughter got married and graduated college and moved away to Florida. Somewhere in there she and her husband both got COVID, but it didn’t hinder them too much, thank God, other than the loss of her sense of smell. She is only now starting to recover that.

I published my first novel. I am way behind on what I spent putting it out and marketing it, but I figured I was going to pay for my lessons with this book, and I feel like I have. The next novel release should go a lot smoother and I know what I’m doing (mostly.)

My eldest son started law school, commuting from home for now. My youngest child started his freshman year, after a gap with everything that was going on in our lives.

I feel like I have reached a new stage of my life, and I also feel a little bit like a butterfly that has emerged from a cocoon, with so much to see and experience.

I am discovering just how much I love music. I have for a long time, but the depth of my love for music, especially 70s soft rock, alternative rock and pop punk, is making me regret that I didn’t invest in learning an instrument or learned to sing or how to engineer or really anything related to the music scene. We’ve been rewatching (new for me) Dave Grohl’s Sonic Highways, and it hits me in the gut just how much I love everything about the music scene, from song writing to performing, and how artists do it for the love of it, how it drives them and just how much talent they have for creating something. And their drive to do this makes me a little jealous. To know what you wanted to do since you were 12 or 13 years old. God, how I would have loved that.

I find that I am a very balanced person. A big picture guy. I went to college a little too soon, I was 17, and didn’t take it seriously. I missed out on a lot of cool things because I simply didn’t have the bandwidth. But now I am slowly catching up. I am happy and in love and loving life. I have several guitars that I hope to learn to play someday, but maybe that’s not my thing. I do love to sing now and I am a writer, maybe that will be a thing. Who knows. But despite everything, all of the loss and pain and misery of the last year and a half, I still think life is good and only getting better.

I hope it finds you well.

Warmest Regards.