Planning Vengeance will be FREE this weekend for Kindle… Saturday and Sunday. You can download it to read at your pleasure, but it will only be free for two days. TWO.

Find out the origin story of Jack “Jonathan” Dixon and Amy Dixon… back when she was Amy Prince. Before they became the power couple, first they had to become a couple, and Paul Murphy would have preferred them dead. Before the billion dollar fortunes and the gaming company, they had to fight to survive. In the process, Jack and Amy learned the secrets of their fathers.

Jack and Amy were average high school students, each with a crush on the other, but oblivious to the other’s affection. Amy was with Paul, though. Until she wasn’t.

She invited Jack to her end-of-the-school-year party, and he made his move. They were both all in. Their families were all in. Paul was not all in.

Paul Murphy ended up on the run, hunted by the police and Jack and Amy’s father. He exposed the secrets of his father, too. That results in Paul’s father and brothers also ending up on the run.

Download Planning Vengeance to your Kindle device or app on Saturday or Sunday. Tell your friends… give them an early Christmas present.

I began strong with my NaNoWriMo story. Knocked out 15k words like nothing. The writing was free and easy, but there was a little tickle in the back of my mind.

Well… I figured out the tickle around the 20k word mark. I’m still ahead of schedule, but I have realized that I need to do major surgery. I’m writing in the wrong POV (point of view). I prefer to write in 3rd person-limited. In that POV, the narrator is a third person, apart from the action, and while they might know more than a fly on the wall, they are not omniscient. That would be 3rd person-omniscient…

This story was screaming to be written in 1st person-multi. Effectively, each chapter (or section) would be written from the perspective of a character. The narrator would know what the character knows, and what the character thinks, but NOT what other characters may know or think. It would also shift, allowing a different person to be the narrator in different areas.

I can recycle some of the work I’ve done so far, and the scenes are the same, just often requiring enough of a rewrite as to mean it’s easy to just write it over, but at least I don’t have to re-imagine the scene.

The hard part (because of NaNoWriMo’s writing goals) is deleting chunks of text. I was killing a thousand words at a time this morning. I would write a new section, and delete the old one. So… trying to stay above the writing goal, while deleting thousands of words… yuck.

Now we’ll see if I can keep it up.

I hear this a lot when I’m giving out free Kindle books. Sometimes they want me to give them a free printed book… sometimes it’s really just an excuse to try to avoid offending me. But every once in a while, they really don’t know that they can read Kindle books without a Kindle. Read More

Feel free to check out my Amazon Author page to see my current books. Most are available for $2.99 for Kindle, $12.99 for print… and if you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, they are FREE to read all the time.

By the way, I’m always thrilled when you share my social media book posts, blog posts, or books with your friends and followers. Thank you.

Or maybe missed is the wrong word.

For those that aren’t familiar, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. And it’s November. The object is to write a 50,000 word novel over the course of the month. Anyone that completes the objective is a “winner”. Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean an edited, complete, ready-to-roll novel at the end o f the month. It means a raw-assed first draft. Rough… ready to be worked into something worthy of pride. Read More

I should also mention that Who, What, When, Why? is FREE for Kindle right now. Hurry and download it to read at your leisure. Consider it Trick or Treat candy in your pumpkin from me…

I’m not going to be mad if you share my blog posts, pass along my Amazon Author page, or talk up my books to your friends and followers. I’d also LOVE for you to subscribe to my blog. Emails are usually no more than one a week (and if I don’t get back to blogging regularly, they won’t be that often. AND, you get a FREE e-book…)

I am not a perfect writer. At all.

By the time I release a book, I have read it at least a dozen times. Generally, those reads have been over the course of months. I try to set each book aside for a minimum of a couple of weeks before I give it a “final” edit… at least final before I send it to beta readers. Before that, I have read and re-written the book over and over.

After beta reading, I have a template of mistakes to fix (thanks, Marj… one of my favorite beta readers… she is VERY thorough). I go through the notes on typos and other issues that need fixing, as well as general problems they may have found in the work. I correct everything that is wrong… that they, and I find. Also, if called for, I correct content that needs to be corrected, fix plot holes, etc. After all that, I re-read it again, taking my time. If needed, I send it out to new beta readers (which I why I am always looking for people that want to read and give feedback).

Finally, after all this, I post the book to KDP (other services may be utilized in the future, too). That is the gateway for authors to Kindle. When it uploads, the system does a sweep for errors, but it doesn’t catch everything, and it flags on things that may not be errors (names are often flagged as misspellings). I review it again, and often find one or two things that really needs to be corrected.

A day or two later (unless I have it up for pre-sale), it goes live on Kindle. Woot. My work here is done. Not.

I “buy” a copy and send it to my tablet. I read it. On Angel, I found 18 things I needed to change, ranging from missing or double words, to awkward sentences that I thought of a better way to word. There were still a few typos or wrong words. Despite half a dozen different eyes, and multiple re-readings, a ‘to’ instead of ‘too’ or a ‘there’ rather than ‘their’ slipped through.

So, I edit the manuscript and re-upload. Woot. My work here MUST be done now. Still probably not.

If you ever wondered why I don’t set books up to print right away, this is why. Usually, a friend will message me that they found a mistake. I will correct and load it up again. Usually everything will be largely shaken out in a couple of weeks, and then I work on reformatting for print. I can’t update those issues away.

If I find something significant, I can “push” a Kindle update. By doing that, downloaded books are updated. I have done this, but not often. It’s drastic and I have to jump through hoops with the people at Amazon.

Overall, though, I like that if there is a mistake in a manuscript, there is a path to correct it, especially for future downloads. And if the mistakes are critical, it can even be retroactively corrected. I know that I am NOT perfect. I try not to let it get to me… but it does… and just move forward. I read a LOT of books, both “indie” and traditionally published. I regularly find mistakes, misspellings, etc. I know I’m not the only one. I also know that as a self-publishing author, the pressure is on me… not just for my own works, but to keep up the reputation for self-publishing.

As I mentioned in my last post, I had stepped back from the blog a little since June. I released Angel (Guardian Angel/Angel of Death) on July 15th, and had been working on the post beta read edits and getting it polished up for release. I have also been working on a few other books…

First is Shining Star/Drowned/some other title yet to be realized. It is more of a pure romance (sweet romance… nothing graphic). There are some action scenes, but it is more about the primary relationship between the two main characters. It is also written in 1st person with multiple viewpoints. Mostly it is the primary characters (Jax and Crys), but there are a few chapters with secondary characters sharing their perspective. It is NOT part of the Dixon-Prince series, although I am considering a few Easter eggs for readers of my other books… character mentions, etc. This book is currently out with some beta readers, although I would LOVE to have some more eyes on it… It might be an October release.

The next one is another conspiracy/action/romance called At Arm’s Length. It is a Dixon-Prince book, and Warren Chestik is on of the secondary players. It is one of the love lost/love found books I seem to like to write, set against a backdrop of conspiracy, kidnapping, and distrust. I’ve actually been kicking this one around for a while, and I think it will be going to beta after the previously mentioned book gets cleared.

I still have several others that are close behind…

One of the questions I’m facing right now is release schedules. I have a bunch of things in the pipeline, and my first instinct is to get them out quickly, but I could literally have books into the third quarter of next year if I release quarterly. And some books are harder to get ready than others. Grafton took me well over a year to finally get from concept to published.

Regardless, there will always be samples and announcements here for upcoming books. And you can hit up my Amazon Author Page to see what is currently published.