Progress Progress

I had been hoping to have a cover to reveal for Episode Two by now, but there have been a couple delays. With luck I’ll have it any day now, and can get a pre-order up and going. In the meantime, I’ll be posting a preview chapter of Curse of the Daemon Beast on Friday.

In the meantime, work on Episode Three, currently titled Arkton at High Noon continues on schedule. I’m about 15k words into what I think will be an 80-90k book, so that’s promising. There are a lot of cool things I’m looking forward to including in that book. Feels odd, wanting to talk about the third volume when the second hasn’t even come out yet, but that’s the life of a writer for you.

I also loaded a map of Korvana up here, so if you’re interested in seeing what the lay of the land is, be sure to check it out.

Finally, there is an absolutely flattering review of Episode One that just went up on Reddit. It’s always touching to hear back about what people think of my writing. Since I do this for fun as opposed to a profession, hearing from fans is really what makes this all worthwhile.

That’s all the news I have for now. Check back again soon, and hopefully I’ll have something exciting to report!

Status Update

So life has been crazy-pants over the last few weeks, both writing and non-writing related. The free weekend went MUCH better than I anticipated, and the book was downloaded something to the tune of 1500 times! I’m still reeling from that number, like how can my book be on FIFTEEN HUNDRED different people’s devices? It is a true dream come true.

There aren’t many reviews up on Amazon yet, but Goodreads has quite a few so far. Hopefully they’ll keep coming, but even if they stopped today I could die a happy man.

I’ve also sent out book two to beta readers, who are hopefully chowing their way through it as we speak! I’m very eager to see how the second book is received, since it is much longer and more ambitious than the first, but also much more insular (the entire story takes place in a small town in the mountains).

Meanwhile, my children have been trading colds with each other for weeks, so our house is mostly under quarantine. Hopefully the sickness will depart with the cold weather, and soon everything will be wonderful both inside and out before we know it!

Finally, if you happen to read this post, please consider leaving a message. I’d love to know I’m not just screaming into the void here.

Historical Errors in Bulletproof Witch

Episode One has been live for a week now, and hopefully has actually been read by a few people at this point. If you drifted over or found this blog due to the giveaway going on at r/Fantasy, hello fellow Redditors!

Now, having a great passion for 1800’s America, I’m sure there are plenty of factual errors I made in the book concerning a number of topics. If you noticed any, feel free to let me know in the comments. Today, however, I wanted to talk about three issues that I knew about and acknowledged going into writing.

You may be wondering why any of this matters, given that this is a fantasy work taking place in a fantasy world. While it is true that Korvana is not the USA, context still matters, and a story that relies entirely on made up facts is not a story, IMO.

Issue One: Horses

Temperance rides a single horse, Peter rides a single horse, and Obidiah spends most of his time on the back of a mule. This doesn’t really change despite the distance traveled, or the hard riding during their adventures. If you’ve ever seen an old western movie, this is pretty atypical, but a little bit of research into the life of a cowboy will reveal an issue here.

Fact is, horses get tired. A  rider would have had several horses when traveling (or swapped out for fresh ones along the way). A cowboy might have had as many as seven with him while herding cattle on the trail. This would usually have been comprised of two morning horses, two day horses, a night horse, and two cattle horses if he was lucky.

A night horse is specially trained to find its way back to camp in the dark, allowing the cowboy to snooze in the saddle.

Cattle horses are for exactly what you think they are: roping and directing cattle.

So why do the characters have only a single mount in this story? Temperance is obviously an exception, since even if Astor got tired like a regular horse, he probably wouldn’t have brooked the extra company. As for the others, it was mostly a matter of logistics. Early drafts of the chase scenes proved too confusing with the addition of more horses, and it didn’t really add anything to the narrative to include them.

Issue Two: Jerky vs. Pemmican

On several occasions during their journey, Peter and Temperance set down to eat a meal consisting of little else than hardtack and jerky. While not exactly historically inaccurate, it would have been more likely during the 1800’s for them to be eating pemmican.

To give credit where it is due, pemmican is an invention of the native Americans, used as a staple food for centuries before the arrival of white men. It involves drying meat into jerky, then mixing it with the fat of the animal. When properly stored, this has the benefit of preserving the meat almost indefinitely, and indeed pemmican has been discovered to still be edible decades after it was assembled. It also adds flavor and makes it a bit more of a rounded meal to consume.

There are cases of people in the 1800’s surviving for extended periods nothing other than pemmican when little other food was available. On one occasion, miners working hard days lived on upwards of six pounds of pemmican a day to keep their energy up!

So why didn’t I use pemmican in the story? Mostly because the food isn’t well known (they aren’t exactly selling much pemmican at my local grocery mart), and I worried that with all the other made-up words in the story, it might have just been swept under the rug. Who knows though, maybe it will put in an appearance in a later book!

Issue Three: The Harmonist Wagons

Alright, this one isn’t exactly an issue, per se, but it’s something that seemed noteworthy. During the so called period of “Western Expansion”, the preferred method of travel across the American Midwest was a type of wagon referred to as a prairie schooner. If you’ve ever seen a western or watched Little House on the Prairie, you’ve probably seen one: a buckboard style wagon with a white canvas cover. These varied in size and exact materials, but the designs were typically the same.

While I refer to the wagons the Harmonists use in the story as prairie schooners, historically the use of such vehicles was meant more for temporary travel, not the permanent living solutions as they would be for the Ta-tet. When settlers crossed the great plains they were typically not sleeping or doing much living inside the wagon itself, as every inch of space would have been needed for the supplies they brought along. Typically this wasn’t even much beyond the essentials, as a settler would need as much as 2,000 lbs of food for the journey.

While the Harmonists could trade with various towns for the goods they need as they journey, their isolated nature and pariah status would likely discourage this with any but the most free-thinking communities. Of course, their are other more unique, fantasy-esque aspects at play here too, which I hope to expand on in later books.

***

Well, that’s everything. If you’ve read Bulletproof Witch, I hope you still enjoyed it despite these horrendous historical inaccuracies. At the moment I’m hard at work finalizing Episode Two, so keep an eye out for an announcement about that in the near future!

Episode One is Live + Giveaway!

The first book in my Bulletproof Witch series, The Delivery of Flesh, is now available. It can be purchased at fine bookstores everywhere, assuming you only shop at Amazon:

However, I’m assuming if you’re reading this, you already know the book exists. Likely you came across the ebook version, but did you know it’s also available in print? In fact, I’m giving away FIVE (5) copies of the printed version to the first penta-gaggle of people to send me their contact info via my contact page.

This contest is completely separate to any other giveaways that I have going on around the web. I’ll update this page once all the copies are gone, so if you don’t see a message at the top saying so, there are still freebies to be had!

Episode Two is Complete

We’re now exactly two weeks out from the official release of episode one, and I’m happy to report that I have finished the bulk draft for episode two as well. Now to get it cleaned up and off to beta readers!

I know this probably seems at odds with my last post, where I was worried about delaying works because episode two was only half finished, but in the last week or so I have laid down a truly staggering amount of words. I’m honestly as surprised as anyone. It certainly wasn’t my plan to write so much in the 11th hour, but the story was there in my mind and wanted out. Frankly I’m glad to not have it bouncing off my mental walls anymore.

So yeah, good news. I’m going to take a little break after this to get back to another project, but with luck will be pulling episode three together this summer for a release at the end of 2019.

Progress Update

Well, I was hoping to have better news at this point concerning book two, but it’s something of a mixed bag. Early on in November I was sitting around 30%, and expected to be done with the first draft by the end of the year.

As of today I’m around 55%. While progress has been steady these last few days, trying to solve a couple logistical issues with the overall series combined with the fact that book two has grown a bit in length (I’m guessing it’ll weigh in around 80k words now, compared to the 30k of book one), means that I’m looking at finishing closer to the end of January now. I don’t expect that to impact the release date for book two, but I may have to adjust my timetable for further books if they prove as lengthy as this one.

The silver lining, I suppose, is that there will be a lot more content in the next book (titled “Curse of the Daemon Beast”). The book will focus a bit more on life in Korvana, as well as some of the specifics behind hexbullets and daemons. Plus lots of tension, high stakes battles, and magic bullets flying everywhere! I’m looking forward to seeing it when it’s all done.