'Swords of Kos: Dark Inheritance,' Freebies and Indexes

My life is always quite busy as any readers of my infrequent blogs will understand. Work, spending time with my family, training Martial Arts, gaming and relaxing does tend to take away from my time to be creative.

I know, I know. I’ve stated this all before. But it is who I am and it’s what makes me tick.

Fortunately for me, I am able to work on my novel during my breaks and my lunch at work. This has been a serious help as on the average day I’m able to write upwards of 2000 words. I find it difficult at best to write once I’m home due to everything else that I have on my plate.

However the Sword of Kos: Dark Inheritance has been coming along at incredible speed for me. I know I talked about it in my last blog, but I feel that there is still plenty to say.  Consider this… I actually put those magic words ‘The End’ to the book about three weeks ago. The novel finished with a total word count of just over 86,000 words.

I then began the tedious (to me, at least) job of doing the first initial edit and re-writes.  As of this particular blog, I’m just a little over half finished the initial edit, and have added almost an additional 10,000 words to the novel’s length.

I figure that by the time I’m finished with the edit and the initial re-writes, the book will easily break the 100,000 word total.

I’m VERY happy with that, believe me. I just hope that anyone who reads my novel will consider the additional material I’ve written for it to add to the overall story instead of acting like filler.

The reason I have added so much additional material to the novel is that during my re-write, I discovered that there were things that I mentioned in the novel and never touched upon. I’ve taken extensive notes during this edit to ensure that I do cover those points. Although some I removed with edits, as I felt that they really did not add anything to the overall story.

I’ve set what I hope is a realistic goal to finish the additions and the first round edit by the beginning of December. However I don’t know if that will happen or not, as I am notoriously bad when it comes to meeting deadlines, ESPECIALLY self-imposed deadlines!

For anyone who is interested in the novel, even though I’m still working on the first round edits, I’ve already begun the task of plotting out the sequel to the novel and have at this time THREE short stories planned out that I will work on after the beginning of the New Year, if not sooner. And these will be short stories, instead of full length novels. 

No matter what, after I am finished with the first edit and re-writes I plan on working on several issues of “Wisdom from the Wastelands,” as I mentioned in my previous blog. I want to write up between four and six new issues, not just the ones I mentioned previously.

Speaking of WftW, I recently went to the old skirmisher site and copied all the bonus material that I posted there for various issues of the e-zine. In addition to those articles, I also copied the massive article index that I had created to keep track of where all the various rules, technology, monsters and other goodies.

I fully plan on updating that particular index and reposting in here on d-infinity.net AND I will keep it up-to-date!

Not only will I be doing that, I will also re-post all the free material that I created (and the few bits that fellow author Derek Holland contributed to the forum), and I will see about adding new free material for all my issues that have been published.

Even if it’s only a couple of bits and pieces, doing so is better than nothing and I hope that the additional free material will please my readers.

Going back to Dark Inheritance I have commissioned a very talented Filipino artist by the name of Giorgio Alfonso Maesa to not only do the cover for the book, but to draw one scene for each chapter. Last week I posted one of the concept sketches for the cover. That was of Viya, the Tiefling. She is one of the three major characters in my novel.

This time I am posting the concept art for Jarem, the Half-Orc. He is the second of the three main characters for the novel.

I figure that is about all for this week folks, so stay warm (unless you live someplace where winter doesn’t hit you like it does here!) and most importantly, stay happy!

Peace.