The Time Capsule

I'm pleased to announce plans to send print advanced retail copies to those interested for Watermeloned: A Mystery Sci-Fi Novel releasing on June 27, 2023. The plan is to send these out sometime in early May or sooner if they are available. If you are interested in receiving a copy, please fill out the form below. And remember, until then: Don't. Get. WATERMELONED! Loading…

Photo by Geri Forsaith on Unsplash This past weekend, I experienced a terrifying moment. My writing process for my next novel, Watermeloned: A Mystery Sci-Fi Novel , is to use Scrivener on multiple devices. Using Google Drive as a conduit to a common file, I can hop from device to device, picking up where I left off with all my pretty words and wordy notes for the book. Well, I hopped to my Windows tablet to continue writing this past weekend, and suddenly around 3,000 to 4,000 words had gone missing. One was an entire chapter! Calm down,  I thought.  It's going to be OK. But really, I did panic some. Sure, 3K to 4K of words is pretty decent. But imagine if I lost the entire book of 40K at that point? Yeah, that be bad, fer sure. Even with that much lost, there are still little things you might not get back when rewriting. Nuance to the wording. Ideas that popped into the stream of consciousness that were added or even removed from the original story outline. OK. I have Scrivener

Photo by Charlie Read on Unsplash Part of self-publishing's joy is the author's complete control over every aspect of their novel's publication: Content. Title. Cover Design. Etc. Part of self-publishing's frustration is also the complete control an author has over every aspect of their novel's publication. There's a lot to do and learn. One essential item is the book description (or book blurb). This information is listed on Amazon or other retailers, giving potential readers an idea of whether a book will interest them. As self-published authors, it can be challenging to write this effectively because we either want to hold back as much information as possible, so we don't spoil the story, or we enter too much information into it because otherwise, we feel the description will not make sense. For over a decade of self-publishing, I've had some bad and good descriptions. What I've learned reads best is to follow some of these simple rules: Keep th

In late July/early August 2022, I had that nagging feeling pop into my head for a story. The first part involved a mash-up of a murder mystery mixed with some sci-fi intrigue. Sometimes, those types of thoughts are fleeting. But this one stuck with me. I started working out a plot for the story. Then characters. Back story. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And all of this bounced around in my brain without a single thought put in writing. Then, in mid-August, I put my thoughts to paper (more like a computer screen). First, I fleshed out the back story. Next, I provided more detail about the main characters. Then, chapter by chapter, I outlined how the entire story would unfold. It may have been a month or two of getting that all in line before I started writing the novel properly. As it stands now, I currently finished chapter eight. As it usually goes with the writing process, things have changed. Finishing chapter eight is actually finishing chapter eleven of the original outline. I

Time kinda flies, ya know? Nearly 11 years ago, Fram Gage and The Infinite Ability released on Kindle. Since I wrote and released two more books in the series, Fram Gage and The Three Adversaries  and Fram Gage and The Holographic Man . Meanwhile... I had always intended to compile those three novels into one edition, and I'm happy to announce that day has finally come! On September 2, 2022, Fram Gage - Limited Series Edition , will release for Kindle! With this compilation, I'm taking a sort of "reboot" type approach to the series. Why? Well, I always intended for Fram Gage  to be a superhero origin type story. While I feel the book covers served their purpose well, with this release, I really wanted to give that comic feel to it. With that in mind, here is the cover for the book: Fram Gage - Limited Series Edition All three novels in the series are included in this book. Along with that, it will include some revised formatting that'll continue a similar theme t

Photo by Road Trip with Raj on Unsplash Do you have a great young adult novel that you've written and can't wait to send out to the world? Maybe it's dystopian, science fiction, or just good-ole literary fiction. As you're setting up your book in Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), you're asked what category you want the book in. No matter where you scroll, you can't find a single category called "Young Adult". There's "Juvenile Fiction" but that just doesn't seem right to you. So how do you categorize for Young Adult fiction? The issue here is that the categories listed are BISAC categories. But Amazon will then take these categories and fine-tune it on the back end for their internal categories. They base these on several factors such as keywords, age group, etc. Here are the two simple steps you need to follow when setting up your book on KDP to ensure they fall into Amazon's Young Adult category. Step 1 First, make sure at least