Breaking Radio Silence: An Update (and oh yeah, there’s a Big Sale happening)

The Promotion

This weekend (August 16-20), over 100 SPFBO titles are on sale for only 99 cents! Great titles abound in genres ranging from epic to dark to urban. A Wizard’s Forge is one of them—scroll down to the bottom to find it along with other grimdark and dark fantasies.

The Update

But for one post in March, this blog has been dead for almost nine months. The usual things that plague writers—life events, heavy workloads, stress, crippling self-doubt—are behind my blog-avoidance behavior, but today is the first day of the rest of my life, so let’s go.

SPFBO 2019

Last year A Wizard’s Forge was an entry in the gladiatorial ring of the Self-Publishing Fantasy Blog Off (SPFBO), a fantasy novel competition sponsored by Mark Lawrence. Alas, Vic’s story fell in the first round, although I thank judge Lynn Williams for her kind words and the opportunity to write a guest post about how the fairy tale “Rapunzel” inspired my dark story of a woman with Stockholm syndrome and her quest for revenge on a planet far from Earth.

This year, I’m participating in the SPFBO as a judge on the Fantasy Faction panel. As a group we’re still reading our “slush pile”—the 30 books out of 300 assigned to us by founder Mark Lawrence, and I’m excited to discover the hidden gem that will be our group’s finalist. This competition always includes some truly awesome books, of which I’ve reviewed the following from the 2018 batch:

A Wizard’s Sacrifice

Writing this book has been tough, or I should really say, rewriting it. Like Forge, Sacrifice is a rebooted version of a previously published novel. I’m streamlining the story and fixing plot holes and increasing tension. The rewrite requires a lot more changes than I made in the Blade of Amber to Wizard’s Forge rewrite. Vic’s tale of personal vengeance expands into epic fantasy territory as multiple conflicts break out within and between Knownearth’s human and alien inhabitants. The future of humanity is at stake, and the past holds the key to saving it.

I’d hoped/planned to release Sacrifice this fall, but now I’m aiming for a Q1 2020 release. At least there’s a gorgeous cover (another stunner from Steven Meyer Rassow). I’ll reveal the whole thing later, but here’s a teaser.