Bit of a slow week this week due to my Connecticut Renaissance Faire commitments, but progress has been made here and there. By the way, you should all come check out the show and see what I do when I’m not writing.

WRITING PROJECTS

The Adventures of Strongarm & Lightfoot – Assassins Brawl: Revisions continue. I am now into the third act of the book and my hope is to finish draft two before the end of the month at the latest. After that, it goes out to my test-readers. Meanwhile, Tricia has received my notes for the cover and is getting ready to start work there.

Action Figures – Issue Six: Power Play: Pre-editing revisions are done, in the queue for editing.

Action Figures – Live Free or Die: Pre-editing revisions are done, in the queue for editing.

Action Figures – Issue Seven: The Black End War: About a quarter of the way through the first draft. Once Assassins Brawl is out of my hair, I’ll be getting back to work on this so I can have it ready for a spring 2017 release.

APPEARANCES and EVENTS

• Sunday, October 2: The Connecticut Renaissance Faire’s 2016 Meet the Author series, which runs from 1 to 3 PM.
• Saturday & Sunday, October 15 & 16: The fall New Bedford Bookfest. Times TBA.

MISC.

My friend Phil is planning to start up a podcast about the art of storytelling, and he’s asked me to participate. I love talking about the craft, but what I love even more is helping my friends with their creative endeavors.

The podcast will feature a segment about the art of storytelling followed by a reading by me. I’m considering the first chapter of The Adventures of Strongarm & Lightfoot – Scratching a Lich (which also happens to be the S&L short featured in Cheap Thrills Digest) for my reading – which will be my very first, so I should probably rehearse it a couple of times.

Finally, I’m passing along this link to an essay about one of the lesser known problems facing independent authors: requests for free books.

Now, I’ve been asked to donate copies of my books before, to libraries and fundraisers and the like, and I’m always happy to do that, but this article isn’t about benign requests like that. This is about regular readers trying to get free books from writers just because they don’t want to pay for them.

Long story short, people: that’s a shitty thing to do. Aside from the fact some indie authors (like me) depend on book sale income for their livelihood, most indie authors self-fund their projects and pay out-of-pocket for editing, cover art, advertising, etc. In some cases their passion to create may be so strong that they’ll gladly go into debt to keep providing readers with new stuff, but many others cannot afford to do that and rely on their book sales to fund future projects.

If you love an author’s work, asking for free books — or worse, reading the book and then returning it for a refund — isn’t how you show it. You support independent authors by leaving reviews for their work, telling family and friends about it, and by paying for it.