Joshua P. Simon - The Accidental Author

Today’s blog post is a general update on what I’ve been doing the last few weeks.

1. Warleader: A Blood and Tears Short Story – The short story went live a little over two weeks ago and since then my focus has been trying to do what I can to get the word out about it. I appreciate all those who have bought the story and especially those who have told others about the work. Word of mouth is always the best form of advertisement!
   
   I’ve submitted the story to a few review bloggers but unfortunately not many people review short stories (especially fantasy). Thankfully, I’ll have a much wider pool to submit to when Rise and Fall, my novel, goes live later this year.
   
   In order to generate more interest in Warleader, I’m holding a giveaway at www.librarything.com which ends November 1st.  This is a great way to get reviews (often cross-posted on various sites) and expose new people to your work. If you're interested in participating, log on or create an account, click here, then scroll down about halfway and look for Warleader.


2. Rise and Fall: Book One of the Blood and Tears Trilogy – I received comments back from my editor last Saturday and started work on them this Tuesday. Lots of great points/advice, most of it on the first few chapters of the book. That isn’t surprising since I know I improved as the book progressed.
   
   My goal is to finish the edits by November 15. That would then give me (really, my wife Leah) about two weeks to format Rise and Fall. Then we’ll both do one last proofread of the text before uploading it. Obviously, things can change at any moment but it’s my goal to have this available by December 1st. Keep your fingers crossed!


3. Walk Through Fire: A Blood and Tears Novella – This is another prequel story that focuses on Jonrell (one of the main characters from Rise and Fall) and the mercenary outfit he commands. I’ll give more information about the story long before the release date (shooting for April 1, 2012).
   
   I recently made another pass through the text and cut a little over 4000 words (mostly fluff). Right now it is about 40K words and I expect to reduce it a bit more once Leah does a line edit for me. Then, it will go to my beta-readers around early December. After I incorporate their feedback, I’ll send it off to my editor.


4. Steel and Sorrow: Book Two of the Blood and Tears Trilogy – I’m about 56K words into the first draft and I expect it to end up around the same size as Rise and Fall (180K or so), give or take a few thousand words.
   
   My approach to writing this book is different than how I wrote the Rise and Fall. I’ve decided to write one entire storyline first before going back and writing the chapters relating to the second storyline.
   
   I’m not quite as far along as I would like to be at this point, but there’s only so much time in the day.
   
   The last thing I did before putting the manuscript aside to edit Rise and Fall was to spend a couple of weeks performing some surgery on what I had already written. There were a couple of problems I knew about and originally planned to fix after the first draft was done, but they were nagging at me too much, so I decided to clean them up now. Before I dive back into writing the first draft again, I’ll probably need to spend a day or two tweaking my outline as I’ve changed a few things I originally planned to do because it just wasn’t working.
   
   Still, I’m happy with the changes. There is a lot of cool and exciting stuff happening in those early chapters.

Any questions?