Keith Robinson's Blog, page 9

Mountain of Whispers Audiobook now available!

The third book in the Island of Fog series, Mountain of Whispers, is now available in audiobook format! You can find it at Audible, Amazon (US), Amazon (UK) and iTunes.

One of my favorite characters in this book is the old one-eyed soothsayer, who predicts that "the mountain is the key to everything." Hal and his friends go to Whisper Mountain to face the so-called Shadow Demon and free the temple so the elves can reclaim it. Of course, they find something far more important, and the soothsayer's words ring true.

The narrator, Fred Wolinsky, again does a fine job of keeping each character's voice distinct enough that you can tell who's speaking even without the dialog tags. This audiobook weighs in at 11 hours, 47 minutes, which is about two hours longer than the previous two audiobooks. It marks the completion of the original trilogy and nicely wraps up the Island of Fog audio presentation for now. Will I ever produce Book 4? It entirely depends on sales, and I really need to wait six months or more before deciding.

And finally, for those who read my monthly short stories... I suspect the aforementioned soothsayer might show up and provide a few predictions of what's to come in the near future. Stay tuned!

Help make a book permafree... and then get it for free!

Giving away Book 1 for free has always worked well for the Island of Fog series, and now I want to make that happen for the Sleep Writer series.

Now that the third book, Caleb's World, is published, I've set the price of the first book, Sleep Writer, to $0.00 on Apple and Kobo. Unfortunately, authors can't do that at Amazon or Barnes & Noble because there's a $2.99 minimum price. However, Amazon will often price-match if they're informed of a cheaper deal elsewhere.

So here's where I need your help. If you get a moment, go to the Sleep Writer product page:

Amazon US: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NB65G40Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00NB65G40

Scroll down to where it shows the Product Details. Under that section it says:

Would you like to give feedback on images or tell us about a lower price?

Click on "tell us about a lower price" and a small window will open. In that window, all you need to do is select "Website (Online)" and then enter one of the following URLs to indicate where you found the book at a cheaper price:

Apple: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id919265579Kobo: http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/sleep-writer-unearthly-tales-1

Enter $0.00 for both price and shipping cost, then hit "Submit Feedback" and you're done.

If enough readers shout about a cheaper deal elsewhere, Amazon will (hopefully) reduce the price of Sleep Writer to $0.00 for Kindle, where it will remain permafree forever.

And then YOU can download it for free.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Caleb's World (Sleep Writer Book 3) is published

It's done! The third book in the Sleep Writer series is now published and available.

CALEB'S WORLD
(Sleep Writer Book 3)

Ant's premonition of his friend's house being annihilated comes true when Liam's house is destroyed one Saturday evening -- but not by a dreaded laser bolt from space. Instead, a massive sinkhole opens up and plunges the house deep underground with Liam and Madison inside.

Could this be the work of eight-year-old Caleb, the mysterious, all-powerful, long-lost son of Ant's chauffeur? If so, he's created an incredible and frightening underground world...

This is the third book in the Sleep Writer sci-fi adventure series.

Available on Kindle US, Kindle UK, Nook, Apple, and Kobo. See also Goodreads.

Price: $3.99

This is the series that bestselling author Piers Anthony raved about recently. After finishing the first book in the series, he said, "For my taste this is one of the best novels I've read regardless of genre; it haunted me for several days after I read it." So give it a try if you haven't already. There are now three books in the series with many more to come!

Happy Halloween!

Another book just about ready to publish

I'm just about finished with editing work to Caleb's World, the third installment of the Sleep Writer series. I aim to publish it before the end of October, and I'll post links when available.

This will be my 15th novel (or 16th if you include a novella), totaling about 1.3 million words. Whew!

When I was at the Dragon*Con convention in Atlanta one year, a panel of editors had some advice for newbie writers. One said, "Write a book, then trash it. Write another book, and trash that one too. Write a third book, and that's the one you should submit as your debut novel." Another was a little more brutal, saying, "Write at least a million words before you try to publish a book."

I agree with the sentiment. I've definitely learned a lot since Island of Fog, and listening to the audiobook version highlights some clunkiness I've moved beyond in more recent writing. But a million words before you try to publish anything? That seems harsh.

Is it, though?

Strictly speaking, Island of Fog wasn't my first written novel. It was just my first published one. I completed a novel before that, along with a novella, several other half-written novels, and numerous short stories, all totaling at least 300,000 words. So you could easily consider Island of Fog my "third" book, making it eligible for publication in the eyes of one of those editors.

Would I ever considering publishing that previously completed novel? Absolutely not. The Secret of Gromble Gorge is kind of a nice idea, if a little too cute. It's like a precursor to Hal and Abigail's adventures: a girl named Rebecca Tinklepott (!) comes across a sad young dragon named Snap (!) who yearns for adventure outside his parents' territory. The world is completely flat with a chasm across the middle, and it turns out there's another world on the underside, accessible only by those brave enough to drop into the chasm.

Looking back, there are a few ideas I'd be willing to salvage from this novel, but there's a lot more I'd ditch in a heartbeat. So it's not worth trying to do anything with. The writing itself is so painfully bad that I'd end up rewriting every single sentence, therefore it would be much easier just to start over with the general plot in mind. Which I sincerely doubt will ever happen.

Anyway, the point is that I wrote (and trashed) quite a bit of stuff before I ever published my first novel, and I think the first few books in the Island of Fog series pass muster despite some clunkiness. I've improved ever since. Nowadays, my writing is much leaner and more tightly polished, and therefore shorter.

Caleb's World is another novel that I never published despite several revisions. Now it's a Sleep Writer book, and much of the content is entirely new. Probably about half of the finished product was in the original in some form, but even that has been thoroughly polished.

Look out for this latest addition to my personal library sometime over the next week!

Free short story Trading Magic now available

A day late again! I've had a very busy month doing house renovations and other things, and my writing time has been spoiled by a side effect of all that hard labor: sleepiness.

Yes, instead of burning the midnight oil writing, I've been napping in my recliner. Or, as my dad would say, checking my eyelids for light leaks. While I enjoy the renovating work -- knocking down walls, reframing, hanging sheetrock, and all that good stuff -- my body keeps saying "Whoa! What the heck is THIS?" and making me fall asleep in the evenings.

All that said, I could just plan my month better and make sure to write the short story earlier so I have plenty of time. So from now on I'll try to do better.

Anyway, here's this month's short story, which I've dated October 15th because it was technically ready by then...

Trading MagicSo where exactly do the shapeshifters' smart clothes come from? This is a little peek into life below the water, the home of the sinister miengu, where something exciting is about to happen: the execution of a prisoner.

Read Trading Magic and other short stories, and look for another next month!

Free short story Unicorn Poachers now available

This story might surprise you. It's a glimpse into the future and in fact is in the first chapter of the new Island of Fog series due for release in the New Year.

It's twenty years on from Castle of Spells. Hal and Abigail are now married with a twelve-year-old son of their own. Cale is ready to choose what kind of shapeshifter he wants to be, and the story will follow his decision-making process while dealing with a logical threat in this new twin-world future: poachers paid to capture exotic creatures for private zoos.

I hope you enjoy Unicorn Poachers. Please do let me know what you think. Now's your chance to shape the future of the Island of Fog series. :-)

Caleb's World undergoing final edits

Book 3 in the Sleep Writer series is close to completion! I have another round of editing to do, then a "fast" Kindle read, and then I'll wait for beta reader comments, do some fixes, and then it should be good to go. That will hopefully be sometime in September, or early October at the latest.

Click for larger view

The cover for this book was surprisingly difficult to do. See how the world wraps upward in the background? That's because it's an inverted world about three miles across. I was fascinated when I went to see the movie Elysium because it, too, has an inverted world, only it's just a strip, the inside of a giant wheel in space. There's a similar concept at the end of Interstellar, only that world is wrapped around the inside of a massive, cylindrical craft. Mine is actually spherical and entirely fantasy, but it's still an idea that intrigues me.

And by the way, I wrote the original Caleb's World way before those two movies came out. ;-)

Anyway, I had to piece together a few different aerial shots and throw in some extra stuff. I couldn't just get a landscape and "bend" it, because although the curved effect might be there, the angle of the trees and everything else would be wrong. I had to find scenes taken from increasingly high altitudes. I wish I could have taken a hot-air balloon ride straight up into the air and got lots of photos on my way, and then I would have had a "vertical panoramic" melded together with a really accurate inverted curvature.

Anyway, you work with what you have, right? It's not perfect, but I kind of like it. And yes, there's a volcano. Even with a hot-air balloon ride, I wouldn't have found that feature in my local area!

I changed more of this pre-written, unpublished novel than I expected. I should have known. It's quite a few years old and not up to more recent standards. Reading it made me realize just how much I've streamlined my writing over the years, and putting it out as it was would have been like taking a step backward in terms of quality. So I had to rewrite a LOT, and I also restructured throughout and added new scenes while deleting others. It's really close to what it needs to be now, a true third book in the Sleep Writer series.

More information soon!

Free short story Robbie and the Ogres now available

I had fun writing this short story. It follows Robbie as he visits the ogres in the west, hoping to enlist some muscle so that Blacknail can put an old crane together. It's a scene from Mountain of Whispers that happened "in the background" while Hal and the rest of the team headed home to Carter.

I always saw ogres as a little dimwitted and clumsy, but I also saw them as gentle giants. I think you'll like these ogres a lot! When Robbie is one, he does well to retain his human intellect until he's rendered stupid by a smile from Lauren, which I think is true with most boys (and men) in love with a pretty girl. It's even worse for him.

The type of crane in the story has always interested me. Anyone who wants to know what a treadmill crane looks like and how it works just needs to watch a video featuring Tony Robinson presenting one of the "worst jobs in history." Cut to exactly 2 minutes in if you want to skip the history and get right to a working demonstration lifting a small car!

Lifting a small car (6:32 minutes)Lifting a stone block (23 seconds)Lifting an even heavier stone block (1:59 minutes)A double-drummed treadmill (31 seconds)

Treadmill cranes come in all shapes and sizes, but they all do the same thing, and many were used in castle construction. I can easily see a centaur walking around the inside of the wheel and lowering stone blocks into the shaft in the stone quarry. As you might remember from Mountain of Whispers, that shaft led to the elven temple, which the centaurs had built over a decade prior.

I hope you enjoy Robbie and the Ogres. Look for more missing scenes and untold tales in the coming months as I scoot around the timeline and latch onto things I think are worth telling. :-)

Monsters in the Fog is published!

This collection of short stories (previously posted on this website) chronicles the very first transformations of all the shapeshifters, as seen from their own individual perspectives. It's like the first Island of Fog book rewritten at only half the length and told in the form of separate but interconnected tales.

Although priced at $2.99, it's FREE on Kindle for two days on August 1st and 2nd, 2015. Get it now while you can:

Download Monsters in the Fog from Amazon USDownload Monsters in the Fog from Amazon UK

(Make sure the price is actually $0.00 before you download it. The 2-day free period starts sometime in the wee hours on August 1st, and ends 48 hours later.)

For all those who haven't yet read the stories, now's your chance for a complete ebook at the same price as the short stories on this website ($0.00). And for those who have already read the stories... well, feel free to grab it anyway! Every download helps.

If you like Monsters in the Fog, please consider a review. As you know, reviews and ratings really help us lowly authors make an impression. Thanks! :-)

The second Island of Fog Chronicles book due for release on August 1st

The recent series of free short stories about how the shapeshifters first transformed will be available on Kindle in about ten days from now, on August 1st.

These stories, which I've been posting on the website over the last six months, work really well together and are intended to complement the story you already know, delving into the off-stage lives of Hal's friends. I've taken great care to make sure everything overlaps perfectly and can be directly compared to the original novel. The tales are told in approximately chronological order; as I said, there's a lot of overlap. The collection should also work as a complete standalone introduction to the series for newbies.

Monsters in the Fog will be the second Island of Fog Chronicles book, around 41,000 words in the form of interconnected tales, priced at $2.99. (As a comparison, Eye of the Manticore was a 33,000-word novella.) It will contain the following:

Wings of a Faerie Nameless Monster Dragon in the Woods Night of the Centaur Bird-Girl and the Shaggy Beast Darcy the Dryad Riding the Serpent

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that I'm including Hal's transformation scene as told in the original Island of Fog novel. It's lifted directly from the last third of Chapter 9 and the whole of Chapter 10, a complete self-contained scene that works very nicely and fits with the rest of the tales. That means the eight main characters are dealt with, and Thomas features heavily too though his initial transformation can of course be read in the novella Eye of the Manticore, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Apple.

I intend releasing this on Kindle ONLY at the moment. I want to give their KDP Select program another try, which means making the book exclusive to Amazon for three months, during which time I can run special promotions. But I expect to put it up on Nook, Apple, and Kobo after that period has expired at the beginning of November.

Stay tuned!