Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Winter's Blood Paperback Coming Soon!

Good morning everyone. :)

Ever since Winter's Blood: A Werewolf Novella was first published, I have always had the desire to see it in paperback form scratching incessantly at the back of my head. Much as I appreciate the speed and relative ease of e-publishing, print publishing will always be my one true love. So perhaps it was inevitable that one day, I would sit down at my computer and write this very blog post, announcing that a paperback edition of Winter's Blood will be released in November!

I'm absolutely thrilled to be bringing you this news, and not just because of my own personal preference for hard, physical copies of the books I both read and write. Despite the prevalence of e-readers like the Kindle, there is still a very substantial number of people who don't have or want one, and this paperback edition finally gives me the opportunity to share Winter's Blood with them as well.

Plus, I'll finally have a copy of my own that I can actually stand on my bookshelf. :P

Monday, July 1, 2013

Here We Go Again

If all goes well, July 1st, 2013 will forever be remembered as the day I officially lost my mind.

Yes, that is the most positive outcome.

Why, you ask? Well quite frankly, you have to be a certain kind of crazy to dive head-first into writing a story all about angels, demons, and the potential extinction of humanity.

A bit of a departure from writing about a love-sick werewolf, huh? :P

In any case, I've been working on the Apocalypse Project for disturbingly close to eight years, and now I'm finally about to dig in to the real meat of the story. Even though there is technically one book in the series before the one I'll be starting today, the two books actually occur simultaneously, and this book is actually the one that introduces the true main character as well as the broader, overall conflict. There is a lot going on in this book that I am very, very excited about finally getting to write, because this story has been gestating in my head for almost as long as I've been writing.

Take care everyone, I'll have more to share soon. :)

Thursday, June 27, 2013

The End of Vlogging (For me at least...)

I know I've been dancing/circling around this for a while now, but I think it's finally time for me to come down firm and say for sure that I won't be posting video blogs anymore.

There are several reasons for this. First and foremost, through means I don't understand, my YouTube channel was somehow separated from my Google+ account, so I now have to upload my vlogs to YouTube on a different channel before I can post them here, and that gives me all sorts of headaches. Secondly, YouTube itself is doing some seriously shady things to the non-commercial channels on it's site. People with literally millions of subscribers have seen their view counts plummet over the last few months because of changes YouTube has made to the way videos show up in subscribers home pages. So if the most famous people on the site are getting screwed, what does that mean for a little guy like me? Nothing good.

Finally, my third reason. It takes a lot of extra time and energy to make those video blogs. Shooting them alone can take upwards of half an hour, then there's at least another half hour of render time, and then another half hour for the video to be uploaded and processed on YouTube. So that's at least 90 minutes taken out of my day, for a video that may only be viewed one or two times. Not exactly worth the effort, is it?

The bright side of all this is that not only is that at least an hour and a half of writing time that I get back, but it also means that I get to spend more time being active on my various social media outlets (this blog included). Much as I love video as a medium, I think it'll be better for all of us if I leave it behind for the foreseeable future.

And stay tuned to this blog. I've got a couple cool things in the works that I can't wait to tell you about! :)

Saturday, May 18, 2013

The Apocalypse Project: Stopping and Starting



So what exactly was it that made me get back to work on The Apocalypse Project? Give me seven minutes of your time and I'll tell you. :)

Friday, May 17, 2013

The Apocalypse Project Returns!

I told you all you'd more than likely be hearing from me again today. :P
Now that I've got my thoughts and plans mostly organized, I thought I'd take a bit of a break and explain the significance behind this so called "Author Earthquake". Expect another video blog tomorrow. :)

Can Authors Have Earthquakes?

I'll just leave this here. I have some reasonably serious work to do on some other parts of this website. :P

Thursday, May 2, 2013

My Life With Attention Deficit Disorder



There are many ways I could describe life with ADD. In the past, I've described it as like living with a constant sort of "white noise" in the back of my mind, but I feel now like that's too superficial a description. It doesn't really get into the nuts and bolts of how my mind actually works. However, lately I've been using a new description that is admittedly much more verbose, but also much more accurate.

Imagine for a moment that your mind is a gargantuan ball of yarn, made up of hundreds of individual thought-threads. Each one of these thought-threads contains a single thought, and allows that thought to travel throughout your brain. It has a specific start point and a specific end point, and it is confined to its own specific thought-thread.

You got that? Awesome. :)

Now imagine that rather than staying confined to their own thought-threads, your individual thoughts can leave their original threads and jump into others. Imagine that this can and does happen with the smallest influence, the slightest little nudge. And imagine that that influence can be literally anything. Even the sheer fact that your thought just jumped from one thread to another.

Still with me? Cool. :)

Now, I want you to imagine that this is not a one-off thing. Imagine that your thoughts are constantly jumping from one thread to another and back again, hundreds of times a day, and usually several times a minute.

Finally, imagine that you have absolutely zero control over this process.

In a nutshell, that is what it's like living with ADD. That's also why I chose to write today's post out as opposed to talking it out in video form. When I'm talking and one of these thought jumps occurs, my natural tendency is to continue down the new thought-thread rather than finish the previous one. This is why I pause so much when I talk, and why I sometimes go off on seemingly unrelated tangents.

My ADD kicked in.

At least for me personally, there is also one extra little wrinkle. If, out of all that chaos, something actually does grab my attention, I will focus on it to the exclusion of almost everything else. Even physical urges like hunger and the need to use the bathroom simply do not register with me in that state. On the flip side, if I find that something is boring to me, it is all but impossible for me to focus on it at all.

What about the middle ground, you ask? What about the things that are not terribly exciting, but also not truly boring either? That's where the yarn-ball metaphor comes in. If something does happen to fall into that middle ground, then it joins the hundreds of other thoughts that are constantly bouncing around in my mind and becomes just another part of the chaos.

If that thing is something that needs to get done, like homework for example, then it does bounce to the forefront of my attention a little more often; usually as a result of a conscious effort to get it done. Even so, my other more entertaining and interesting thoughts will often intrude and distract me, and this results in the assignment only being worked on in short bursts. Which is why an assignment that someone says will only take ten to twenty minutes would usually take me an hour or more to complete.

If I complete it at all.

By this point, I imagine that many of you are wondering why I don't take medication. Thankfully, my answer to this question is simple. I don't take medication now because when I was taking it, I couldn't write. Sure, my thoughts didn't constantly jump from place to place and it was somewhat easier for me to get my homework done, but I'd lost my ability to write my books. I could still plan them out in my head, but for whatever reason, the bridge between my brain and my keyboard had been completely blocked off by the medication.

In the end, the trade-off was just not worth it to me. Especially considering this all happened after I decided I wanted to be an author. Kinda hard to be an author when you can't write. :P

And this brings me to the other question I can imagine you asking by now. Why am I sharing this? For two reasons. One, my ADD affects a lot of my behavior, and so I hope that by explaining this all now, certain things about me will make more sense. The other reason, and the bigger reason if truth be told, is because I wanted to give people an idea of what it's like living with ADD. I wanted to take you inside my mind for a moment and show you the basics of how it works. I wanted to do this in the hope that if you're reading this and you know someone who has ADD, be they a co-worker, friend, or family member, you now have a better idea of what life is like for them.

I've met people who think that those of us with ADD are just stupid, or that we're lazy. The truth is that we're neither of those things. The truth is that our brains simply work differently than theirs do.

And me personally, I like the way my brain works. :P

Saturday, April 27, 2013

Free Books and Arrows!

Wow. I have to admit, this KDP Select promotion for Winter's Blood has already gone FAR better than I'd expected it to! :)


Thursday, April 25, 2013

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

The Lion, The Arrow, and The Website

So yesterday proved to be a huge headache website wise, but nevertheless, here is the video blog I shot that day. :)

EDIT: I know I said in this video that I would post a new vlog "tomorrow", which would have been today, but the topic I want to talk about is actually fairly important, and at this point I'd just be rushing it out. So expect my next vlog tomorrow, 4/25/2013. That way I'll be able to sleep on it, collect my thoughts, and do it right. :)