Call of the Creator: Fantasy Writing from a Christian Worldview

The day a book goes "live" on Amazon or Barnes and Noble is exciting in a sickening, hang on for dear life, all I can do is watch everything unfold sort of way. For the past five years, my imagination and efforts have been consumed (for the most part) by the creation, rewriting, tweaking, overhauling, and details of a book I once called The Sword of the Patron . It was the first novel I ever began to write, and now I would say it is in something like its third version since its inception. And that labor of much angst, joy, struggle, and triumph is now available for sale, over a week before I thought it might be on the virtual shelves. Until now, the fate of my work has been more or less in my hands. I could have my say about what stayed or went. I could advocate for the story, or the look of the book, or the promotional information. But now that the book is released, it's like sending your child  away to college. You've done all you think you possibly could to pre...

Yes, fantasy fans, here it is! If you aren't one of my facebook contacts, perhaps you haven't seen this yet: The cover for my book releasing October 2012! I have known what the cover painting for this book was for quite a few months, actually, since Christina Hess did such an awesome job of getting it to me so quickly. I even had a pretty clear idea how the text would play out. But still, when you see it attached to an email that says "This project is done and going to the printer in the morning..." that's still pretty exciting stuff. I don't know if that ever gets old, no matter how many books you write. So keep your eyes open for Curse Bearer at your favorite book etailer...I will be sure to post an announcement when I know the book is up for pre-order or regular sale. Thanks for dropping by!

I'm excited to report: with just a couple of days to go in the Launch Curse Bearer Kickstarter Campaign, the small army of backers has reached the campaign's goal of $3500 worth of funding! As of Thursday morning, the amount raised tipped over the "success" level, so that means all of the marketing stuff I have planned for the book is a go. Of course, the campaign remains open to donations until midnight of the Saturday, September 15th, so if you or someone you know was still thinking of contributing, it's not too late. The one thing about advertising and marketing--there's no such thing as too much of it. The crowdfunding trend is one I am finding very interesting. Projects tend to have excellent success or crash completely. From what I am seeing, it has about 20% to do with what the project actually IS and 80% to do with how that project is presented. For example: a book project with a garbled description is pretty much doomed to failure. The general p...

Today, I got the official word that the adjustments to the series name on my novel releasing next month are locked down. The journey through titles on this coming book has been something like canoeing through rapids. I wrote two-thirds of the manuscript back in the rough-draft stages (wow, that seems like ages ago) calling it nothing but "Danae's Story." I have always had a deep an abiding loathing of titling my works. I never title my drawings. I always struggled to affix a title to my films in college, and then they usually turned out to maintain the name of the works I was adapting for film ("The Highwayman," based on the poem by Alfred Noyes, and "The Cat and the Fiddler," based on the short story by Lloyd Alexander, for example.) This title-phobia extended quite naturally into when I started writing fiction. I finally settled on a title of The Sword of the Patron for my novel, since I was going to start showing it to people and I figured I be...

For those of you who have been waiting for more   Windrider   Sketches, I do apologize there haven't been more forthcoming in the past few weeks. It seems my attention has become completely monopolized by the last stages of getting   Curse Bearer   ready for its release this October. I imagine it's possible that some of you who frequent this blog may be familliar with only Vinyanel and his exploits, so maybe a little summary is in order... Curse Bearer   is the novel I started before I wrote a single word of Windrider stories. Back when it went by its old name,   Sword of the Patron ,  I can credit the connection I made with Diminished Media to   Curse Bearer's   presence on a forum. You see, I was participating in an online critique forum over at ChristianWriters.com, and Tim Ambrose caught sight of the type of work I was writing and asked me if I would consider submitting a story to the then brand-new Digital Dragon Magazine....