Thief's Coin awakes at midnght hour

Welcome, Thief’s Coin, to the World of Publishing.

Today Wings launched its September stable of new books and Thief’s Coin is one of them.

It was a harried birth. Thief’s Coin was targeted for an October birth, but the Wings people decided to push it up to September.

In mid-August they forwarded an email request for me to submit 10 questions to a fellow author that will appear as a new novel interview on the Wings’ website. In turn, another author would submit questions to me.

But there was a bit of a snag. I’m embarrassed to say I accidentally deleted the email. Knew nothing about it until another email arrived in my In Box asking why I was late. I pulled it off, though. A few hours later 10 questions went to H.L. Chandler for her soon-to-be-published novel Lost in Fear.

A few days later a set of interview questions came to me from author Laura Burke. I set my mind to answering them and soon had the finished interview flying back to Wings. Go to wings-press.com and check out the interview. You’ll find the four newly published novels, including Thief’s Coin, on Wings’ home page. Just click on the cover of my novel. After reading the interview, think about purchasing Thief’s Coin. And since it’s the second book of the Larenia’s Shadow trilogy, you’ll want to purchase the first book, The Emperor’s Mistress. They really should be read in sequence.

By the way, what do you think of Thief’s Coin’s cover? Artist Richard Stroud created the scene, which depicts the young thief Stealth as she eyes the tower that may hold a prisoner, Prince Derrius Hextor, the boy she loves.

Richard also did the cover for The Emperor’s Mistress. He’s very good at capturing action. The scene of Stealth stabbing at the dragon with her long dagger can’t help but pique the interest of any reader who loves fantasy and Dungeons & Dragons style adventure.

Getting to this point with Thief’s Coin wasn’t easy. The galley was sent to me a week ago with Hurricane Irene lurking off the Florida coast and headed up toward where I live – Wilmington, North Carolina. The publisher wanted the galley proofed and back to Wings as soon as possible. The hurricane didn’t cooperate. High winds starting Friday evening and continuing into Saturday afternoon sent limbs tumbling onto electrical lines. It’s difficult to proof a galley when there are brownouts every ten or fifteen minutes and finally an outage.

When the lights went dark in the house at about 2 p.m. Saturday, I expected we’d be without electricity for perhaps a day or longer. During Hurricane Fran in ’96, we ran the generator for nearly a week, powering just the refrigerator, one light and the TV. But Fran was a far more powerful hurricane. During Irene, the electricity came back on in less than two hours.

That was fortuitous for Wings. I was able to get the corrections back to the publisher on Wednesday.

Now I need to focus on the third novel, Assassins’ Lair. It has been started with the first fifty-five pages, or seven chapters, written. But I put the project on hiatus in December to concentrate on edits to Thief’s Coin. My job as a weekly newspaper reporter takes up an exorbitant amount of my time, but I’ll need to figure out how to set aside some time to work on book three. Wish me luck.

Publisher offers contract for 'Thief's Coin'...

Well, that was fast.

The finished manuscript for Thief’s Coin went to Wings ePress in Mid-June and within a week or so it was accepted for publication.

The contract came via email. I printed it out, signed it and sent it back by snail mail. Wings ePress wants to release Thief’s Coin in October.

As the publisher’s name makes clear, Wings ePress is an online publisher. The company’s lean and does things fast. While a traditional publishing house can take to a year to get a novel to publication, Wings ePress does it in three months.

Thief’s Coin is the second of my novels Wings ePress will publish. The publisher released The Emperor’s Mistress in August 2010. The novels make up books one and two of the Larenia Shadow Trilogy. Some of you may have bought The Emperor’s Mistress. If you did and liked it, consider purchasing Thief’s Coin. Some of you may not know I’m an author. Why not consider purchasing books one and two of the Larenia Shadow Trilogy? Then you can critique my novel-writing skills?

The third book, Assassins’ Lair, is underway—barely. The first seven chapters have been written. It’s only about 20 percent complete.

 

These books are fantasy novels. The trilogy is about two teenager lovers – a prince and a thief – on a quest to thwart the ambition of a thousand-year-old sorceress to rule an empire and take revenge on the royal family who imprisoned her deep in a glacier. The lovers, Derrius and Stealth, can pull off their quest by “stealing” a magical sword – Larenia’s Shadow – and using it to negate the sorceress’s magic.

The novels are set in an alternate world similar with aspects of both Ancient Rome and Medieval Europe. In The Emperor’s Mistress, the action takes place in the countryside. Thief’s Coin is mostly an urban adventure. The plot puts Stealth back in the warrens of her hometown where she has to use her cunning to rescue Derrius from the clutches of her archenemy Jarn Sork, the sorceress’s master spy.

I tweaked the plot of Thief’s Coin after evaluating a critique by fellow author Jeannette Cottrell. By focusing on Stealth’s actions, I weakened Derrius’s personality, Jeanette said. I went back through the novel and toned down places where Derrius might have come across as a wimp. I finished tweaking during a visit to Las Vegas in late March to visit my friend Sharon. Once back in Wilmington, I read through the manuscript a final time to make sure my editing changes meshed with the plot and then emailed it to Wings ePress.

I’ve still a couple of things I must do. First, I have to provide some suggestions for a cover. Artist Richard Stroud did the cover for The Emperor’s Mistress and it’s quite stunning. Go to my website at lareniashadow.com and check it out. I hope he does the cover for Thief’s Coin.

I also have to provide a back cover blurb, a 25-word plot summation and a three-paragraph synopsis.

Come October, folks, think about ordering the book. You’ll be able to order directly from the Wings ePress website, Fictionwise or Amazon.

Some of Wings ePress’ romance writers have half a dozen or more published novels. They spit them out like Henry Ford’s assembly lines spit out Model Ts. They must get some very nice royalty checks. Maybe someday, eh?

What a combination! Sumptuous strawberries and a book signing …

I’ve some breaking news regarding my writing career.

I’ll soon be doing another book signing for The Emperor’s Mistress. This one is scheduled for Saturday, May 14 at the Carolina Strawberry Festival in Wallace, N.C. I’ll be set up in the Wallace Enterprise tent in downtown Wallace.

A news story about the book signing will be going into the Wednesday, May 11 edition of the Wallace Enterprise. Hopefully, the story will generate some interest in the novel and I’ll see people dropping by the tent to buy the book. 

My last blog in March reported on my frustrating efforts to finish the second book of the Larenia’s Shadow trilogy. I was hopeful I could set aside some time during my April trip to Las Vegas to finish up editing Thief’s Coin. 

I know some of you are saying: You went to Vegas and worked on your book? Are you crazy? 

My girlfriend Sharon lives in Henderson just outside Vegas, and I went there to snuggle with her. Well, she had to work some of the time, so I figured I’d focus on Thief’s Coin during the hours she worked.

I managed to crank up my laptop and stay away from the slot machines in Sunset Station. A fellow author had recommended some fairly extensive edits that would require a bit of rewriting, and I managed to make those changes.

And I did get to play with Sharon down on the Vegas Strip. She got to show me all her favorite haunts…the Bellagio Fountains, the gondolas of the Venetian, the overhead light and music show on Fremont Street.

I’m now doing a final read-through on Thief’s Coin before I send it to my publisher. It would be embarrassing if a continuity disaster slipped through. I’ve just finished reading page 100. The novel is 444 pages in length.

I’ve added quite a few new Facebook friends in the last few weeks, people I worked with back at the Daily Commercial in Florida in the ‘80s and at TSI in Wilmington in the ‘90s. Hopefully some of you are taking a gander at the blog and perhaps even checking out my website.

My publisher, Wings ePress, is a small operation, and doesn’t have much of a budget for marketing its authors. We are expected to help out with marketing. I’ve done the website, this blog, and sent out news releases, but my efforts are really quite minuscule compared to what I’d like to accomplish. The job at Cape Fear Newspapers leaves me little free time.

I’ll blog again after the Strawberry Festival and let people know how the book signing went. Hopefully I’ll be able to report some nice sales. And if I’m really lucky, maybe some bookstore owners attending the festival will want to do some book signings.

I've an overwhelming need for a magical clock...

It’s been a while since I blogged. I’ve been weighed down by an incredible amount of work. If you get a job offer to become a weekly newspaper reporter, particularly in sports, reject the offer—especially if another job with normal hours is a distinct possibility.

I’ve not been able to finish the editing of book two of my Larenia’s Shadow trilogy for months now. I have just one hundred pages left to edit on Thief’s Coin. Get that done, and then I can give it a read-through to ensure the novel still makes sense with all the edits, some of them extensive.

Thanks to a new Postal Service program that resulted in last week’s newspapers being a couple of days late to subscribers, the publisher decided to move deadlines up a day. I’m writing this blog on Sunday, March 20. Normally I’d be writing sports stories and using Photoshop to prepare photos for the paginator. But I did all that yesterday. In fact, I wrote up both news and sports stories. Hour-wise, that’s from 9 a.m. Saturday until 1:30 a.m. today.

I wanted to transition from sports to the news side so I’d have more time to finish editing Thief’s Coin and renew writing chapters for the third book, Assassins’ Lair. But the new sports editor quit after only one week, citing too much driving and too much work. So now I’m doing both jobs.

Next weekend I’m flying to Las Vegas to meet up with my girlfriend and shower together in the proverbial Fountain of Youth, letting it rejuvenate our five-decade-old bodies, becoming—at least in our minds—twenty-somethings once more. But we can’t play all the time…she lives in Henderson and will have to work some of the time. So that distressing fact gave me an idea. I can bring along my laptop and finish those final one hundred pages.

So I can enjoy two kinds of romance…romance with a wonderful woman and the romance of writing books.

The first book of the trilogy, The Emperor’s Mistress, has been out in print since September of last year. Now I can actually visualize emailing Thief’s Coin to my publisher, Wings ePress, sometime in the next few months. For a while I was beginning to wonder if I would ever find the time to finish the novel.

But I still need to find a way to resume working on Assassins’ Lair. I’ve written several chapters, even posted them on an online writers workshop where I received helpful critiques. I participated religiously in the Online Writers Workshop of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror from 2002 until last year when the weekly newspaper workload took away all spare time for creative writing. Sadly, at the end, I had even broken the workshop’s 11^th Commandment…thou shalt return critiques to writers who critique your chapters.

Ultimately, the answer is to find a job that will give me back a private life where I can work on books, go out to a restaurant occasionally, sometimes see a movie. In January I had started to look for a job in the Vegas area…that is until the workload made that impossible. I need to find a magical watch that can stop time for everyone but me so I can resume that job search. Anyone know of any pawnshops where I can buy one?

The ebook adventures of Santa...

Fictionwise, the ebook site operated by Barnes & Noble, provides a best-seller list for Wings ePress, my publisher.

Six of the 10 top novels are romances. The genre is hugely popular for readers who use ebook readers like kindles. If self-conscious while reading in public, they don’t have to worry about bystanders gawking at the risqué covers of half-naked women draped across their lovers’ bodies.

Other popular ebook genres are suspense/thrillers, historical fiction, and science fiction/fantasy.

The No. 1 novel, the only fantasy among the top 10, happens to be The Emperor’s Mistress, authored by yours truly.

A while back the editors of Wings ePress asked its authors to submit short stories for the publisher’s website. The request had me thinking about what genre writers would plot out for a short story with a Santa theme.

Here’s my take, written as teasers:

Mystery/detective: Santa investigates the apparent murder of an elf whose body was found near the stable housing his magical flying reindeer. The little fellow’s head had been bashed in by an iron skillet. The chief suspect remains Mrs. Claus, owner of the skillet, but she claims it was stolen the day before the murder. Santa suspects the voluptuous elf Alena committed the killing, wishing to transplant Mrs. Claus in his affections. Santa must do a fair and impartial investigation and pray that his suspicions are correct. He’s nervous, though. The man in the red suit just learned from a reliable source that the dead elf, Zydar, had been having secret affair with Mrs. Claus, and had threatened to tell Santa if he wasn’t made head of her candy and cookie baking department.

Romance: Readers learn how Santa met and fell in love with Jessica Mary, the future Mrs. Claus. In olden times she was willowy with long blond hair, rosy cheeks and a stunning figure. Back then all the boys in Gotlands, Sweden, found Jessica the cat’s meow. But one in particular, the coolly handsome Loke Gustavsso, had nearly convinced her to make love in her father’s barn’s hayloft, but then Santa came into her life. On a dreary, overcast day in October he’d been taking a new sleigh for an aerial spin when two sick reindeer forced him to make an emergency in a meadow outside Gotlands. When Santa set eyes on Jessica, he felt his heart flitter, and he swore he wouldn’t leave the village unless she sat snuggly on the seat beside him.

Fantasy: When supervising the toy factory became too tedious, Santa likes to retreat to the office and its cozy fireplace for a D&D adventure with Mrs. Claus, chief elf Supervisor Almog Lonelash and his main squeeze, Tiana Lightglow. When too much eggnog leaves his bladder overflowing, Santa must temporarily leave the game to seek relief in the outhouse. Halfway to the jakes, he sees his breath turn to ice and plunge to the snow. A moment later Santa’s sucked into a passing wormhole and deposited into the middle of a laser battle on the planet Niijima—and without his magical reindeer, sleigh and gift bag.

History: A young Santa without responsibilities—his father St. Nick delivers the presents—gets caught up in 17^th Century English politics. Young Santa abhors kings and queens, though he does have an eye for fiery princesses in low-cut gowns. Rather taken by the political beliefs of Oliver Cromwell, Santa joins Cromwell’s New Model Army to rid England of Charles I and his monarchist supporters. As he witnesses the destruction done by the armies to the lives of yeomen, Santa comes to realize the importance of his father’s mission of delivering toys to the children of the world.

When a novel requires surgery...

Here’s how my editing process works. In Thief’s Coin, book 2 of my trilogy Larenia’s Shadow, I ran my chapters through the Online Writers Workshop of Fantasy & Science Fiction. In the first go-through, I sought as many reviews as possible. Often a chapter would get five or more reviews. That’s quite helpful in determining what revisions may be necessary. Once through all the chapters with all the changes made, I posted the chapters a second time on the OWW to give me the opportunity to polish the manuscript.

For my third and final editing stage, I asked a friend, a published author living in Oregon, to take a look at the manuscript and give the chapters a detailed critiquing. I expected some continuity problems but no major rewrites. Instead, she told me she had some serious problems with Thief’s Coin, especially the first half of the novel.

None of the OWW reviews brought up Jeanette’s concerns, but those online reviews have a serious shortcoming. Oftentimes there can be a month or two between chapters. Reviewers do forget the gist of earlier chapters. Jeanette read the book straight through as a reader would do.

Here’s what she wrote in an email: “I'm about 40% into Thief's Coin, and have had a growing unease about Illisandra. I finally figured it out. I'm hesitant to bring it up, but it's a major thing, and could result in people giving up before reading the third book. Illisandra mostly seems like a muddled young woman trying to find herself, and her joys seem confined to tormenting one person or another for no particular reason, and with no real end in view. You have to give me an outrage to make me hate her, involving a profound grief, and you have to do it by chapter 5.”

Illisandra is my villainess, a long-lived sorceress plagued by multiple personality. In the first book, The Emperor’s Mistress, one of the personalities, Charis, sleeps deep inside the sorceress’s subconscious. That enables Illisandra to do her machinations without any interference from Charis. In fact, for most of the first book, Illisandra doesn’t even know Charis exists.

But in the second book Charis is out in full force and the two personalities’ contest for supremacy. That tussle over control of their mind is slowly driving Illisandra insane. Her actions—what Jeanette calls “tormenting one person or another for no particular reason”—are manifestations of her growing insanity.

I decided to run Jeanette’s concerns by a couple of the OWW reviewers and get their opinions. One wrote back: “I think she makes a very interesting point. On the one hand you definitely can't lose the mental tussle between Charis and Illisandra. What you could do is make Illisandra more spontaneously evil. Give it an unpredictable and unhinged quality that would allow her to cuddle puppy dogs and castrate a servant in the following paragraph kind-of-thing. Think Caligula. Allow Charis the more mature and considered evil. And make this clear throughout, thus seeding the sequel. I liked Jeanette's suggestion that you make a powerful sacrifice early on.”

So I decided to make Jeanette’s suggested changes since other reviewers concurred with her observations. I like to see advice from multiple sources before making major changes to a novel late in the editing process.

The end of chapter 5 underwent major revision. In the updated version, Illisandra and Charis have a major argument that leaves Illisandra fuming. The quarrel occurs in a marketplace jammed with people. Illisandra can’t strike out at Charis, so she instead flings her magic at a passing wagon, weakening the back axle. A wheel comes off, tipping the wagon, spilling heavy grain sacks. Bystanders are killed and injured including a noblewoman and her dog.

I wrote: “No! What have I done?” Illisandra’s hands flew to her mouth. She hadn’t noticed the highborn woman and her dog near the stall. The woman had been feeding a sweetmeat to the dog. Both lay motionless beneath under a clutter of grain sacks. “The poor dog.”

Her magic had been done subtly so people would assume it was merely an accident and not spell-induced. As the scene ends, Illisandra rushes to the injured to offer aid. Throughout the early part of the book, Illisandra tries to remove enemies in such a way that it makes her look heroic in the eyes of the general populace. The wagon accident gives her the opportunity to advance her agenda.

I plan one other major revision later in the novel. As Illisandra becomes less and less stable, she will blind the mother of one of my main characters. I had considered killing a major character, but that character is really needed at the end of the third novel, Assassins’ Lair. So the character gets to live.

So hopefully these changes will allay Jeanette’s fears. When Thief’s Coin is published, you who read this will have to buy and read the novel. Feel free to let me know if I succeeded in making Illisandra more spontaneously evil, more unpredictable, more unhinged.

First book signing becomes history

The aroma of coffee and pastry goods greets visitors when they enter the Book Cellar in Burgaw, North Carolina.

Book Cellar co-owner Nancy Alguire handed me a free cup of Courthouse Coffee’s steaming-hot house blend when I walked through the front entrance on Friday afternoon for my first book signing.

Nancy and her sister Sandy Fraley share the building on West Courthouse Avenue with Courthouse Coffee. It’s a courtship made in ‘bouquet’ heaven.

She set me up at a table in the front room among shelves of old paperbacks. The smell of those books complimented the aroma of the coffee as I set the cup on the table.

Soon I had the box containing my ten books on the table. Out came four copies of The Emperor’s Mistress, which I arranged along the edge of the table so people would see them when they walked in from the sidewalk. Near my books were two posters showing the front and back covers.

Those posters were fine ways to let potential purchasers learn the basic plot of The Emperor’s Mistress. The front cover shows a ponytailed tomboy garbed in medieval male clothing battling a dragon. The back cover contains a teaser blurb.

The book signing lasted two hours. I sold and signed three books. And I left two paperbacks with Nancy and Sandy to display and hopefully sell.

All in all it was a nice, relaxing way to spend a Friday afternoon. I chatted with Nancy and Sandy, and learned that at one time they had lived in Riverside, California. They were familiar with Rialto and Corona, towns where my family lived when I was in elementary school and junior high.

Their father is 97 years old and as sharp as men half his age. He doesn’t need a bookmark, but remembers the page where he left off. He taught himself to fly, and as a young man went in with others to purchase a Piper Cub. Nancy and Sandy remember flying with him. He’d tip the plane to give the girls a thrill.

I had a second cup of coffee of the house blend as I listened to them. They compared notes of Grand Canyon hiking trips, and related how much more developed the natural wonder is nowadays than back in the ‘70s. The coffee house hostess shared baked goods with us from the coffee bar, and soon it was time to pack up my remaining books for the trip back to the house.

Nancy and Sandy invited me to participate in another book signing when the second book of the Larenia’s Shadow trilogy is published. Thief’s Coin is in final revision and hasn’t been submitted to the publisher yet, so that book signing will probably take place sometime in the second half of 2011.