Eric Dontigney's Blog

A Long Overdue Update

Okay, so the last year has been…exciting. Busy. Life-altering. The on-a-whim cultivation novel that I started posting to Royal Road took off in ways that I simply could not have anticipated. One thing led to another, and I got a publisher for Unintended Cultivator. Thanks, Shadow Alley Press, you guys are awesome!

If you’re just here to learn about Unintended Cultivator, here’s the snapshot. Volume One is available as a print book, ebook, on Kindle Unlimited, and as an audiobook over on Audible. Volume Two is available in print, ebook, on Kindle Unlimited, and the audiobook is coming soon. Last I heard about it, it was being recorded. So, soon means quite soon. Moving forward, the hope is that all the books will get simultaneous or close to simultaneous ebook/print/audiobook releases.

Volume Three is scheduled for Amazon release on July 2, 2024. You can pre-order the ebook here. (Sadly, the cover isn’t quite ready for public distribution just yet.)

Where does the rest of the series stand? Volume Four to Volume Eight are written to at least a first draft level. You can read some of the first draft versions (up to about the beginning of Volume 7 at the time of this post) over on Royal Road. You can also find those chapters publicly available over on my Patreon page. For the very latest chapters, meaning everything beyond what you can read on Royal Road, there are membership tiers available on Patreon.

Volume 9 is currently being written. I post one or two chapters of it almost every single day for the higher-level tiers on Patreon.

Another project/series I’m working on at a somewhat slower speed is Isekai Terry: Tropes of Doom. The title kind of says it all. It’s a humorous isekai story that relies heavily on the MC’s knowledge of cultivation, LitRPG, manga, and anime tropes. You can check that out on Royal Road here.

Here’s the super hacky cover I threw together for it.

 

 

 

Awesome, am I right?

 

 

 

I have other projects that are moving much more slowly. For long-time readers, yes, I do intend to write more Samuel Branch books. It’s just a matter of timing. For more recent readers, Rinn’s Run is still an active project, it’s just in a bit of a holding pattern for the moment. Book 2 (Rinn’s Run: the Ikaren Gambit) is partially written, it’s just getting written slowly enough that posting updates is more likely to drive readers insane than please them, so I don’t talk about it much.

So, the news is basically that I’m writing, a lot, pretty much every day.

The post A Long Overdue Update appeared first on Eric Dontigney.

A New Day

So, a while back, I decided that I was going to revamp my website. The old one was slow and kind of buggy in places. Well, one thing led to another and I never got back to it. That mostly translated into me having no author website instead of a slow author website. Always a solid move for a novelist, am I right?

So, fast forward a few months and here we are. I’ll freely admit that I despise the new, virtually mandatory, WordPress site editing tool. I hate it with an intensity that verges on the holy. It’s not designed with end-users in mind. It was created with website designers in mind. Given that I have some working knowledge of front-end development and still hate this editor should give you a sense of just how utterly unusable this site editing tool actually is.

I told you all of that to tell you this. Building this new site is taking 20 times longer than it should because I’m having to work around the native WordPress tools instead of with them. Even so, I’m going to keep muddling through and get the essentials up and running as soon as possible. That means listing my various completed and in-progress books (and short fiction), as well as some updates on planned future projects.

I will try to add a progress bar somewhere on the site, but adding widgets is unbelievably, frustratingly difficult with the new editing system. So, it might take me a while to work out the logistics of that. Until I get that sorted out, I will try to post blog post updates on my various works in progress.

Right now, I have two main projects on my plate.

Rinn’s Run Cover

Project one is finishing the edits/revisions that I’ve been promising my infinitely patient publisher on my space opera novel, Rinn’s Run: Zeren Intrigue. It’s the first book in planned series called The Rogue Bloodhand Saga. Right now, I have ideas for around 5 books, but I’d like to make it a 10-book series ultimately.

We’ll have to see if the first book sells enough to justify writing more. In case you ever wondered why authors wrote books that seemed to set up a series but never wrote any sequels, that’s the answer. If the first book doesn’t sell, you have no reason to believe that subsequent books in the series will do any better. As a general rule, you actually lose some readers between the first and second book, but things generally stabilize after that.

My other big fiction project right now is finishing an urban fantasy novel called Jericho Lott. This is also the planned first book in a series. Right now, I have ideas for three books, so it may just end up as a trilogy. I’m publishing the chapters for this one over on Royal Road. It’s up to about 30 chapters at present. You can head over there to check out the chapters. They’re free to read while on Royal Road, but I will eventually turn it into a regular ebook/paperbook so readers can get copies they can keep.

Aside from that, I do plan on cherry-picking some of the most useful of my old blog posts and republishing them here. Although, that’s something of a longer-term project.

That’s the news for the now.

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Visme Review

 

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So, a little while back, the nice people over at Visme approached me to take a look at their cloud-based software. At first blush, it looks a bit like Canva. Needless to say, I quirked an eyebrow at what appeared to be a new piece of software looking to fill a niche that other products already filled. After all, there is already a Canva. For people with a lot more skill in graphic design than me, there is already an Adobe Creative Suite.

Then, I started to dig a little deeper into the software. Yes, it does some of the same things as those other pieces of cloud-based software, but it’s not a one-to-one match for either. It’s more sophisticated than Canva, which creates a slightly steeper learning curve but also opens up more possibilities. It’s less sophisticated than most Adobe products, which is not a bad thing. Adobe products are great, but they are also wildly overpowered and over-featured for the non-professional user. You average user who wants to throw together an infographic will straight up drown in Adobe’s feature set, assuming they can decipher the program well enough to get started in the first place.

Book Covers

As a freelance writer and primarily self-publishing author, though, I have some specific needs. Right at the top of my list is a tool for designing book covers. So, I started there. Since I’ve already built a cover for my upcoming space opera novel in Canva, I wanted to see how hard it would be to more or less replicate that cover using the Visme software. Here’s a side-by-side comparison.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Granted, they aren’t identical, mostly because the specific font I used for the first cover wasn’t available in Visme. I also wanted a version with a larger font for the title to improve visibility for Amazon’s thumbnails. Overall, though, I got similar results. I take that as a good sign. Just as importantly, there were a bunch of features I might have used in Visme that just weren’t called for in assembling this cover. On the downside, the features for adjusting text in Visme were a little more limited…or, at least, I couldn’t find them when I went looking (I’ll swing back to this later.) Overall, though, I’d say that you get equally good options and results from both.

Infographics

Of course, I’m not just an author. I also have a second life as a freelance writer and blogger. That life can produce unexpected demands. For example, sometimes, you need an infographic for a blog. Yes, you can make infographics on Canva, but the options there are difficult to sort through and adjust. I threw together this silly infographic in about 5 minutes on Visme based on one of their templates.

One of the things I really liked about Visme here is that it provided a menu to adjust the circular graphic around the 100% to whatever number you needed it to be. It’s one of those small — but unbelievably useful — features you don’t realize you desperately want until you get to use it.

Brochures

From time to time, I’ve found myself asked to do things that are only nominally related to writing. For example, throwing together a tri-fold brochure. Yes, there’s some writing involved, but you essentially need to build a working version of the brochure to figure out how much text you can reasonably use without cramping the visual space. Again, Visme offers both blank versions of a trifold brochure and template versions. Since this isn’t something I do on a regular basis, I mostly wanted to play around with the templates. So, I threw together the customer-facing side of a brochure for an agency that specializes in ghostwriting blog content for other businesses. Here’s the result:

It’s not the flashiest brochure ever, but that’s on my minimal graphic design skills, rather than any real failure on the part of the software. There were countless adjustments I could have made, but I wanted to test out the usability of one of their existing templates. I was pleased with the ease of use.

Other options

Of course, this is just a tiny sampling of what you can do with the software. Other things you can make using this software include:

VideosGIFsDocumentsSocial media graphicsCharts/GraphsPresentations

Of course, those are just high-level categories of the options. If you dig down, you start seeing the range of options. Under social media graphics, it breaks them down according to social media platform. If you look at the documents section, it ranges from resumes and surveys clear on up to fully-fledged magazine templates. Head over to presentations and they’ll help you put together everything from a SWOT analysis to a budget or a creative brief.

In short, it’s not just a tool for making pretty pictures. It’s a resource for writers, business owners, and even artists on a deadline.

Usability

Usability matters a lot when it comes to graphic design and even document design. There’s a reason why people settle on one program and will keep using it until the heat death of the universe, given the option. Either it has great usability or they spent a substantial amount of time self-educating or getting trained to use a specific piece of software.

The good news here is that Visme doesn’t try to break the mold with the user interface. The vast majority of the features are easy to access and intuitive to understand. If it has a failing, it’s the lack of text adjustment features. For example, I generally expect at least a limited range of text effect options, like a drop shadow, reflection, and glow. These effect options appear to be wholly absent from Visme’s interface. If they do exist, which they may, I couldn’t find them while I was putting together the images above.

Final Thoughts

So, what’s my overall impression of Visme? I really like it. It offers a somewhere more sophisticated interface than Canva, while not going the Adobe route and throwing in every bell and whistle you could want. That extra features make it a more powerful tool without sacrificing on overall usability.

It’s also a bit more versatile in its offerings. It’s a tool that can serve your average blogger or a mid-sized company that has more diverse and specific needs. If you’ve run up against the limitations on Canva and wished there was something between Canva and Adobe Creative Suite, this is the option for you.

The post Visme Review first appeared on Eric Dontigney.

The Year So Far

The last 11 months have been odd and not just for me. There were high hopes that the pandemic would wind down and life would get back to “normal,” whatever the hell that means. Except, it didn’t. Covid v1.0 gave way to the Delta Variant, which largely destroyed Corporate America’s plans to put everyone back in their cubicles by September. And now, the Omicron variant has reared its ugly head. Facts are scant about the Omicron variant so far, despite what social media would have you believe. So, people with their rationality intact get to wait around to see what that means moving forward. More lockdowns and quarantines? Less? Who knows?

On the creative front, I’ve had a pretty good year. There was my bid to complete the first draft of Rinn’s Run (my space opera novel), which I did. With a little luck, revisions will get started in the next month or two. There was the release of the audiobook version of Turns: A Samuel Branch Novel. You can snag that over on Audible. I’m probably on track to finish Jericho Lott by year’s end, knock on wood.

Then, there was the project that I hadn’t planned on. I talk about it (or the process, anyway) pretty extensively over here. The short version of the story goes like this.

My great-grandmother, Genieva B. Pawling, was a teacher and (later in life) a writer. She published two memoirs about her life in rural, western NY. Given that she passed away in 1996, we all had the reasonable expectation that there would be no more books. Well, it turns out we were all very wrong. She had written a third book. It was a short memoir about her time teaching in one-room schoolhouses set largely in the era of the First World War and the 1918 Flu. The book was hidden inside a box and stumbled across by accident. The family weighed in and the decision was made to publish it.

You can reference the link above for my part in the process, but the big takeaway is that it’s now live on Amazon in print and eBook editions. You can snag it through Kindle Unlimited as well.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, you can check it out here.

Here’s a look at the cover.

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Tech and Software for Writers

Photo by VAZHNIK from Pexels

Writers in the age of high-speed broadband and ubiquitous WiFi can’t just wear their writer hats anymore. You’re expected to have a website, social media profiles, and be able to deliver files in any and every format according to the whims of a client or publisher. That only leaves you with a couple of choices. You can enlist the aid of someone who knows what they’re doing with all things tech, which is a valid and sometimes necessary choice. The other option is that you buckle down, put on your student hat, and get a little bit tech-savvy. To help you out with that, I’ve assembled some resources that can make your life easier and boost your tech cred a little.

Website Tech

It would be lovely if websites were an all-in-one package, but they have a lot of moving parts. Just getting a website up and running means buying a domain, selecting hosting, and then getting the website loaded onto the hosting. Let’s break down the pieces.

Getting a Domain

Your domain is basically the URL that your website uses. So, to get this website, you’d type the URL https://ericdontigney.com into your search bar. The “ericdontigney.com” part is the domain. You buy your domain from a registrar. A registrar is a company that serves as a middleman between domain registries and consumers. On the registrar’s site, you search for a domain that hasn’t been reserved.

Assuming you find one you like, you reserve domain names for a fixed number of years. Reserve periods typically run from 1 to 5 years, although you can get them for as long as 10 years. It’s called reserving — rather than buying — because the domain becomes available to anyone again if you don’t renew it every so often.

The biggest player in the domain name game is GoDaddy. They’ve been in the business for decades, which makes them a reliable service that isn’t likely to go belly up on you at a moment’s notice. The only caveat with Godaddy is that its pricing isn’t always great, particularly for hosting service add-ons.

Other major players in the registrar game include:

Network SolutionsIONOS

You should look at a few registrars for comparison pricing, as well as to see if they offer bundled service packages you might want.

Web Hosting

Next up is web hosting. While the registrar provides you with the domain, the hosting company provides server space for your website files and gives Internet users access to those files. Fun fact: when a website goes down, it’s almost always a problem with the hosting service, rather than the company or individual who runs the site.

Web hosting is a little more complicated than looks on the surface. Most hosting companies offer tiers of service. Not shockingly, pricier tiers offer bells and whistles you don’t get at cheaper tiers. Of course, most of those bells and whistles don’t make much difference until you’re seeing major traffic on your website.

Shared Hosting

For the entry-level website, which is most websites, you’ll likely want a shared hosting plan. With shared hosting, the company puts a lot of websites onto one server. All the websites share that server’s resources, such as bandwidth. That means that if one of the other sites on the servers sees a huge surge in traffic, it can slow down your website. These service tiers are typically the most affordable options. As a general rule, you should start here. It’s a cost-effective solution that gets your website online.

VPS

A VPS or virtual private server tier is the midway point between shared hosting and dedicated hosting. With VPS, the hosting service still keeps more than one website on a server, but they partition off your website from the rest. They use software to make it seem like your site is operating on its own server. Your virtual server gets assigned resources that other sites on the server can use up. That means your site won’t get slowed down by anything happening on other sites sharing that same server. If you do see major traffic to your site that impacts things like loading speed, this is probably the next step for your hosting needs.

Dedicated Hosting

With dedicated hosting, your website gets an entire server all to itself. That means you get all of the resources the server can provide. It also lets you configure the server for your purposes. For most writers, though, that level of control isn’t necessary or even helpful. Dedicated hosting is primarily meant for businesses that use in-house IT departments and have special needs. Dedicated hosting is the most expensive tier.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is all the rage right now, but it doesn’t change much for the writer looking to put up a website. In most cases, you see the exact same kind of tiered service offerings and pricing. Cloud hosting may offer a slight reliability and speed advantage over non-cloud hosting.

Hosting Services

There are many reliable hosting services out there, such as:

HostGatorBlueHostHostingerDreamHost

Again, you’ll want to shop around a little. Hosting services will often run discounts and sales you can take advantage of to shave a little off the top.

FTP Tools

While increasingly less necessary for most website owners, FTP or file transfer protocol tools allow you to upload files directly from your computer to your website or hosting server. The one time you need these tools is when you get a custom-made website from a developer. The developer will give you files, but it’s usually on you to upload them to the server.

There are a handful of commonly used FTP tools:

FileZilla (this is popular because it’s free and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems)Cyberduck (Windows, Mac)Free FTP (Windows only)

Since you can get free versions of all of these, it’s mostly about looking at the interface and deciding which one you like best.

Website Creation

You have a few options when it comes to building your website. Each choice comes with particular strengths and weaknesses.

WYSIWYG Site Builders

Some people strongly prefer what-you-see-is-what-you-get site builders. As a general rule, these site builders provide you with a range of preset options. For example, you get a selection of themes that decide the overall appearance of your site. They typically provide you with plugin options that enable things like an e-commerce shop, which is helpful if you want to sell branded merchandise or signed copies of a book.

You typically assemble your website using a drag-and-drop system where what you see is literally what you get.

While WYSIWYG site builders provide a quick-and-dirty choice for getting your website up, they come with some serious pitfalls. You’re stuck with the visual options they provide in most cases. Those options can prove very limited, which hampers creating a site that conforms with your vision. In most cases, you must build and host your site on their servers. Sites that offer WYSIWYG site builders and host websites often make it very, very difficult to export your site to a different hosting service. That makes your life difficult if or when you decide to take firmer control over your website. You also pay a premium for these services in the form of monthly subscription fees, which are typically more than you’d pay for hosting.

For someone looking for a fast, all-in-one solution to their website problem, though, these services can get the job done. A few of the popular options include:

WixSquarespaceWeebly

Of the options, Wix typically ranks best for its overall experience and service. Weebly offers a decent free plan, though you’ll pay for more advanced features and services. Squarespace caters almost exclusively to e-commerce businesses, rather than a general customer base of website owners.

Content Management Systems

The simplest and usually most cost-effective option for writers looking to get a website up and running is a content management system. There are a few popular content management systems, but WordPress is hands down the most popular choice. A little over 40% of all websites use it.

One of the big reasons is that WordPress is free to use. Most hosting companies even offer single-click installation of the core software. Of course, its popularity goes beyond the simple matter of it being free.

WordPress is very user-friendly with an intuitive interface. You can customize WordPress sites for almost any purpose. Countless free themes that let you adjust the look and feel of your website. If you want a very specific look, you can buy themes that will let you achieve that look. You can even hire someone to write a custom theme for you.

WordPress also supports a vast constellation of plugins (some free and some paid) that let you do almost anything you want on your site. That ranges from extra security measures straight through to e-commerce options and search engine optimization tools.

That said, there are other options, such as Drupal and Joomla. As a general rule, Drupal is not user-friendly and almost always requires the help of a professional developer to get a visually pleasing website. While not as technically complex as Drupal, Joomla is aimed more at people with IT experience in terms of configuring servers. Some hosting services support single-click installation of Drupal and Joomla, but not all of them do.

You can check out the options here:

WordPressDrupalJoomla

For an entry-level writer’s site, WordPress is likely your best option in terms of content management systems and site creation overall.

Custom Site

The other option is a purely custom site. Unless you have some deeply compelling reason to believe you need a custom site, it’s generally a bad idea. For one, custom sites are expensive. A basic custom site that’s worth having willing run you about $5000 at the bottom end. Typically, customer website design runs in the $10,000 and up range. You can see a sample breakdown of custom site development costs over here.

On top of that, website visual trends change over time. That site you get designed today will likely look out of date in 3 years. The problem is that getting a new look for your site means overhauling the whole site. While it probably won’t cost you as much for the overhaul, it will still cost a lot.

Then there is the matter of security. A good website has security built-in from the ground up. Those security measures become less effective as time passes. Keeping those security measures up-to-date often means shelling out a monthly maintenance fee to the web design firm you used to build the site.

The big takeaway here is that custom sites are for people with deep pockets.

Website Management

Once you get your website up and running, there is still that pesky problem of managing your website.

Control Panels

Website hosting services use a couple of control panels to help you manage your website. That can mean everything from installing third-party services to creating domain-based email addresses, adjusting account settings, and domain management. There are a few big players in the control panel game, such as cPanel, Plesk, and hPanel. Odds are good that you’ll deal with either cPanel or Plesk on most hosting services.

If you’ve never worked with a control panel before, there are many tutorials available. You can find tutorials from cPanel and Plesk at the following links:

cPanel tutorials

Plesk tutorials

You can also find helpful tutorials on YouTube and tech sites.

Moving WordPress Sites

So, let’s say that you put up a WordPress site, but you’ve decided to move that site to a different domain. You don’t want to start from scratch, especially if you’ve been posting content for years. So, what do you do?

You can head over here for a solid tutorial about moving a WordPress site from one domain to another. The tutorial includes links to several helpful tools that you’ll use in the process.

DIY Website Repairs/Alterations

Not every website problem demands the help of a professional web programmer. It only seems that way because you don’t understand anything about coding. In fact, many alterations that people want to make on their websites require only the most rudimentary understanding of web programming and web design. On top of that, you don’t even need to pay to learn basic coding skills. Here are some sites that will teach you coding basics for free:

FreeCodeCampCodecademyedXKhan Academy

If you’re wondering what you should learn, focus on web essential languages like HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Many of these resources will offer way more training than you need, but you might find out you like coding.

Content Creation

The exact tools you want for content creation depend a lot on whether you’re writing fiction or doing non-fiction content creation as a freelancer. Let’s start with non-fiction content creation for freelancers.

Grammarly

Grammarly is a lot like the grammar checker and spellchecker in Microsoft Word, except it works much, much better. It’s not perfect, by any means, and it can get confused with complex sentences. Even so, it’s a great tool that helps you find and correct basic typos and grammar errors. You can get that basic level of service for free. It works as an extension on Firefox and Chrome, which is very helpful if you work in web-based text editors. There is even an MS Word plugin if you like the Grammarly results.

There is a paid version that will identify advanced style and grammar issues if you want an extra dose of help.

Copyscape

Most writers live in a semi-permanent state of mortal dread when it comes to plagiarism. It can and will get you fired from most writing gigs. Fortunately, Copyscape exists. Even better, it’s the go-to tool that most businesses use to check content before they publish it. You can see the same results your clients will. On the off chance that you have plagiarized something, it gives you a chance to fix the problem before you send content winging off to clients. Plus, it costs pennies for most web content-length articles and blog posts. It’s some of the cheapest and most effective peace of mind you can get.

File Conversion

From time to time, you’ll run across a client who only wants files in a specific format. You can realistically have every possible piece of software on your computer. What you can do is make use of the many file conversion websites out there to turn your word document into whatever format the client wants. As a bonus, most conversion sites will also convert other file formats, such as audio, video, and image files should you need the help.

A few possibilities include:

Online-convert.comFreeFileConvertConvertFiles

You can also find a number of paid services that offer similar conversion services, but may also offer services like cloud storage and high-speed downloads.

Content Creation Fiction

Tools like Grammarly can also help with fiction writing, but it’s not particularly built to deal with quirks like dialects in dialogue. Instead, consider some of these options.

ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid is a bit like Grammarly, except juiced up and made for novelists. It’ll give you grammar and style suggestions while you write. It will also help you identify issues like overused words, readability, consistency, punctuation, pacing, and so much more.

There is a free version, but you get the good features with a paid subscription.

Scrivener

Scrivener is a dedicated word-processing program built to accommodate the specific needs of novelists and other fiction writers. You get a corkboard for notes or ideas. There is a built-in outlining tool. There is even a feature for setting and tracking targets, such as word counts.

Scrivener isn’t a flawless piece of software. One of the common complaints is that there is a steep learning curve to understand all the features. People who do master the software, though, sing its praises. You can get a free trial version or make a one-time license purchase. It’s available for Windows, Mac, and iOS, although the Windows version has persistently lagged behind the Mac version for feature updates.

Kindle Create

When it comes to self-publishing on Amazon, you want the Kindle Create software. It’s free, user-friendly, and will generate an ebook file that Amazon won’t kick back at you for no apparent reasons. Just as importantly, it comes with a load of built-in features for formatting your book in a Kindle-friendly way, such as an automated table of contents linking inside the book.

Calibre

Of course, Kindle files aren’t the only kind of ebook files out there. For all of those other formats, such as EPUB and MOBI, you have Calibre. Calibre can help you take that Word document and translate it into pretty much every major ebook format out there. It also tolerates a wide variety of input formats fairly well, including PDF, HTML, ODT, and PML.

Know of any other helpful bits of tech or software that writers should know about? Leave a comment below and tell us about it!

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Rinn’s Run and Other Updates

Image courtesy of graur codrin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

So, I recently visiting the website of an author I like and discovered that there is a real dearth of recent information. He’s published books that aren’t even listed on the site. I felt a moment of annoyance, which was immediately followed by a stab of guilt. I have no moral high ground to stand on when it comes to keeping things updated on my website. As a partial remedy for that, here are some updates.

On the space opera front, I have completed the first draft of Rinn’s Run: Zeren Intrigue. Yay! It runs about 84,000 words and change in its current form. I suspect that editing will trim that number down a little, assuming there are no major editorial changes required.

On the Writing Challenge front, I’ve written 77,650 words. That leaves about 9850 words that I must complete between now and the end of December. I suspect I can achieve this…just a feeling I get.

With the first draft of Rinn’s Run complete, what’s next? I’m going to take a pass at finishing Jericho Lott. I’m a little tempted not to because it’s been written piecemeal over the last four or five years. I’m honest enough to know that I’m a better writer now than I was four years ago. So, I’m probably looking at a more than usual amount of revision with it. Yet, with only 20,000 – 30,000 words left to write, it seems foolish not to finish it. Plus, I have a couple of sequels in mind for it. If I want to write those, I have to finish this one. Curse you, causality! I’ve got the whole revision phase coming up with Rinn’s Run, so that’ll eat up some time. As I can, I’m going to try to work on some Contingency Jones stories. He’s been lurking in the back of my head more and more recently, so I think it’s probably time. It’s also easier to write short stories than work on a completely new novel while you’re trying to edit and revise. After that, I’ll probably swing back around to either the Rinn’s Run sequel or the long-awaited sequel to The Midnight Ground. We’ll just have to see where things stand at that point.

 

 

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Sam Branch and Rinn’s Run

I’ve been pretty terrible about posting to this blog, so I thought it was high time I checked in and let everyone know what’s going on.

First up, the audiobook version of Turns: A Samuel Branch Novel is now available over on Audible. It’s read by Paul Stefano, who also narrated Falls, the first book in the series. He once again did a great job, especially considering that the Covid pandemic was busy ruining everyone’s lives while he was recording this thing. Thanks, Paul! To shamelessly crib from the late, great Harlan Ellison, you’re a real mensch.

Now for an update on the space opera experiment. A little while back, I realized that my original ideas for Rinn’s Run were going to produce a book that was in the 150,000 to 170,000 words range. Long story short, that’s a LONG book. Like more than 500 pages long. 500+ pages of comparatively small print long. So, rather than slave away for another 3-6 months writing a book that even I consider too long, I decided to split the book into two parts. Now, before you start thinking that I’m just going to cut it off in the middle of the narrative, I’m not going to do that. I’m working hard to bring part 1 to a satisfying conclusion that will lead directly into book 2. You can read more about my thought process on all of this over here.

Right now, my tentative titles for the two books are as follows:

Rinn’s Run: Zeren Intrigue

Rinn’s Run: The Ikaren Gambit

If you’re wondering how close I am to finishing a first draft of the first book, the answer is very damn close. I think I’ve got about 7500 words left to write on it, which means about three or four chapters. I honestly thought I was going to finish it last week, but it just didn’t work out that way. So, fingers crossed that the first draft will be done sometime this week before Sunday rolls around.

As frequently happens to me, the more I wrote in this universe, the more ideas I had for it. So, right now I’ve worked out tentative plans for around 4 or 5 books that will all fall under the series title of The Rogue Bloodhand Saga. I haven’t ruled out the idea of more books, but the final number will ultimately depend on the reception the first few books get and sales numbers. Assuming we get to book 3, which I have some solid ideas for, its tentative title will be The Kessellian Affair.

Now, if you’ve read this far, you deserve a reward. So, there’s a sneak peak at a potential cover for the first book below. What do you think? Sound off in the comments.

The post Sam Branch and Rinn’s Run first appeared on Eric Dontigney.

2021 Writing Challenge

Okay, so I go into all of this in a lot more depth over in this post on the Stupefying Stories site. Here’s the elevator pitch version.

I recently did some math and realized that if I’d been writing even 500 words a day of fiction an average of 300 days per year (well within my capabilities), I should have published 10 or 11 books in the last nine years instead of 5 books. So, I’m committing to meeting that basic threshold of productivity for the rest of the year. Since a big chunk of the year is already gone, I’m aiming for 175 days out of the around 200 days left. That works out to around 87,500 words between now and the new year.

I’ve put a word count tracker in place over in the right-hand menu on the home page with the heading of 2021 Writing Challenge, which I’ll update more or less daily.

The post 2021 Writing Challenge first appeared on Eric Dontigney.

The High Ground and Other Updates

As promised, I have published a new Sam Branch short story over on Amazon. It’s Kindle only, but you can get it through Kindle Unlimited. It’s called The High Ground. Here’s the description:

“After saving a group of college kids from an evil coven leader, Samuel Branch offered them the chance to learn from him. Now he faces what may be his most daunting challenge yet…A sit down with one of these lost sheep’s mother.”

This story takes place after Rises. So, if you’ve been wondering what Sam has been up to since the end of that novel, this helps answer that question.

I’m also chipping away at Jericho Lott and planning the follow-up novella to Onyx & Alabaster. With any luck, I’ll get those both done by the end of the month.

Issue 2 of my newsletter, Dontigney’s Inferno, also went out today. If you’re not signed up yet, you can do that in the upper right of this page or you can click here.

The post The High Ground and Other Updates first appeared on Eric Dontigney.

Novels, Schedules, and a New Short Story

photo credit: Daniel*1977 via photopin cc

I recently wrote about embracing a new mindset for the New Year, but I was a little hazy about the details. That’s because I was still sorting them out. I needed to sit down and really think through what needed to happen to start achieving some of my novel-writing goals. So, here is a more detailed look at what I’m tentatively planning.

Based on some good advice I saw over in the 20BooksTo50K Facebook group, I decided to break down my novel-writing plan into quarters. I estimated that I could probably write about 2000 words a day/6 days a week on a given novel. Using that as a starting point, I also assumed that life would interfere and editing would take longer than planned, so I scheduled no firm writing projects for the last quarter of the year. That gives me some breathing room if I fall behind schedule.

Since I don’t want to overpromise, my tentative schedule through March looks something like this:

Q1

Jan. –  Complete Jericho Lott #1

Pick up on Hartworth #2

Jericho Lott Prequel short/novella

Feb. –  Continue Hartworth #2

Prewriting for Jericho Lott #2

Editing Lott #1

Complete/edit Lott Prequel short/novella

Mar. – Complete Hartworth #2

Start Lott #2

Prewriting for Lott #3

There are various and sundry other things that will happen in there, such as some short fiction for Patreon and blogging, but that’s the core of the schedule. Even if I fall disastrously behind schedule and accomplish nothing but what’s on that list, you can expect at least two or three books from me this year. If things do go according to plan, though, that number will likely double.

For the Sam Branch fans out there, writing Book 4 is tentatively scheduled for Q3. In the meantime, though, you’ll see a new Branch short story go live on Amazon in the next few days. Keep an eye out for the announcement.

The post Novels, Schedules, and a New Short Story first appeared on Eric Dontigney.