Summer is speeding by, and I have been terribly remiss in keeping up with my blog. For those who have reached out to me in recent weeks, asking if I am okay, the short answer is, “Yes, I am.” I won’t claim to be wondrously fantastic, because you wouldn’t believe me if I did. But I am well.
Our new house continues to feel more and more like home. The house itself is pretty much where we would like it to be at this point. A few more doors, door frames, and window frames need painting, but that can wait for cooler weather. We have found a couple of pieces of furniture to fill gaps in the three-season room on the back of the house, and we now have outdoor furniture for the backyard patio. All we need now is a fire pit for the fall. The yard looks great — Nancy has been planting and transplanting and weeding, and I have been keeping the grass under control with my new (used) standing mower. (If you don’t know what a standing mower is, look them up. This thing actually makes cutting the lawn sort of fun.)
We have a large flock of Wild Turkeys that walks through the yard a couple of times each day. How large? Five hens and twenty-two growing chicks. The young were adorable when they were little fuzzballs. Now they’re bigger, more awkward — like adolescents — but still dependent on their moms. Apparently it really does take a village… We also have a White-tailed doe and two fawns who show up most evenings while we’re eating dinner in the back room. And there is a young buck, with velvet still on his antlers, who appears to be shadowing them. Add to that our hummingbird family, the Indigo Buntings and Chipping Sparrows, and our local Cooper’s hawk, and we have a nice selection of wildlife paying us visits on a daily basis.
I have recently finished reading slush for the Skulls X Bones anthology I am editing with Joshua Palmatier for release from Zombies Need Brains. Soon, we will be making our final choices of which stories to include and will begin the actual editing of the manuscripts. And already I am working on my next editing project, which will be for Falstaff Books with the fabulous Sarah J. Sover. More details to come.
As for writing, I have still not done much at all. But that might be changing soon. There are a lot of moving parts to this development, and nothing is set in stone yet, but for fans of the Radiants books, who have wondered if I ever planned to go back to those stories, stay tuned . . . . Yes, I know that I have promised a return to the Thieftaker universe as well, not to mention a reissue of Winds of the Forelands, which I have had on the back burner for years now. Those will be coming eventually as well. I am slowly working my way back into a writing mindset. I would ask for your patience, as I continue to heal and find my emotional footing again.
Nancy and I have been out to see Erin in Colorado, and will be seeing her again before too long. We have plans for multiple trips later this summer and into the fall, and are also looking forward to welcoming some guests to our home.
Other than that, life has been sailing along. We see family and friends. We watch our favorite shows and listen to music. We cook fun foods and taste new whiskeys. I have been playing music as well, polishing long-neglected guitar skills and trying to retrain my voice.
Alex, of course, is a constant presence in my thoughts. I am learning to live with my grief, to honor her memory in ways that do justice to the loss while also allowing me to function and breathe and be thankful for all that we still have in our lives. At the risk of misspeaking for Nancy and Erin, I believe it is a journey for all of us. There’s no real end point. It is just the reality of our world now, and always will be. Not long ago, I shared a song with my guitar buddy and dear, dear friend, Alan Goldberg. It was a tune I first heard on a mix CD Alex made for me when she was in high school, a tune I hadn’t listened to in several years, since well before her death. I knew he would love the song, but I was also afraid to play it for him. I didn’t know how I would feel upon hearing it again.
I needn’t have worried. It brought a smile. It made me feel close to her, thankful for this tiny gift she had given me — one gift among so, so many. Did it make me miss her? Of course, but it’s not like I need help in that regard. And the sweet memories that came with the melody were a balm.
Here is the song. Enjoy your weekend. Hug those you love.
But the media work I have done in the past wasn’t like that. Back in 2009-2010, I wrote the novelization of Ridley Scott’s movie Robin Hood, starring Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett. The movie wasn’t out yet — I worked from a script — and I didn’t know whether or not I would love it. (I didn’t.) In 2018, I wrote a novel that tied in with the History Channel’s Knightfall series about the Knights Templar. In this case, I got to see all the episodes of the first season before the series was aired. I liked the show well enough.
With the Knightfall book, I had a good deal more freedom and control, and so I enjoyed the process much, much more. But still I was mostly writing from the viewpoint of someone else’s characters. There is one point of view character, though, who I made my own — a child who appears later in the series as an adult. But her childhood POV was mine and gave me that sense of ownership, of personal investment in the book.
I have written a lot of books and stories over the years. The truth is, I love all of them. I can tell you a hundred things I like about every book I’ve published, and I believe if I could convince people to read each of them, the books would be very popular. But the fact is, as is true with most authors, some of my books have done far better commercially than others. And, as it happens, the ones that have tended to do well are those that are most easily and succinctly described. The Thieftaker books are my most successful. How do I pitch them to interested readers? “These are magical mysteries set against the backdrop of the American Revolution.” The new series, the Chalice War, is also easy to describe — “It’s a modern urban fantasy steeped in Celtic mythology.” These books, I have found, are as easy to sell as the Thieftaker books, and that is saying something.
The three books of the Case Files of Justis Fearsson and the Radiants duology might well be my favorites of all the books I’ve written. They are exciting, emotional, filled with great characters, and paced within an inch of their lives. But they are far more difficult to describe in a single sentence than other books and, likely as a result, they have never done as well commercially as I hoped they would.
A week and a half from today, on Friday, August 4, 
You see, I wrote the first iteration of book one, Stone, more than a decade ago, when I was in a lull in my career and was looking for something to write for the fun of it. I loved that first draft, but it needed work, and around the time I finished it, I signed my first Thieftaker contract, putting an end to the aforementioned lull. I started work on the second book, Cauldron, about seven years ago, hit a wall, put it away, came back to it four years later and finished it. Now, usually when I write a series, I know as I begin book one how the last book will end. Not with this series, because when I wrote that first book, I was playing around. I had no idea what it would become. So even after I finished the second book, I still wasn’t sure what to do with the series, because I had no idea how to write the third book without making it simply a repeat of one of the first two.
I am currently reading through my Winds of the Forelands series, editing OCR scans of the books in order to re-release them sometime in the near future. Winds of the Forelands was my second series, a sprawling epic fantasy with a complex, dynamic narrative of braided plot lines. At the time I wrote the series (2000-2006) I worked hard to make each volume as coherent and concise as possible. Looking back on the books now, I see that I was only partially successful. I’m doing a light edit right now — I’m only tightening up my prose. The structural flaws in the series will remain. They are part of the story I wrote, and an accurate reflection of my writing at the time. And the fact is, the books are pretty darn good.
But when I hold Winds of the Forelands up beside the Radiants books, or the Chalice War novels, or even my Islevale Cycle, which is my most recent foray into big epic fantasy, the older story suffers for the comparison. There are so many scenes and passages in WOTF that I could cut without costing myself much at all. The essence of the storyline would remain, and the reading experience would likely be smoother and quicker. — Sigh — So be it.
I’ve been thinking of this a lot recently because I am in the process — finally! — of reissuing my Winds of the Forelands series, which has been out of print for several years. The books are currently being scanned digitally (they are old enough that I never had digital files of the final — copy edited and proofed — versions of the books) and once that process is done, I will edit and polish them and find some way to put them out into the world again.
I feel that way about the second and third books in my Case Files of Justis Fearsson series, His Father’s Eyes and Shadow’s Blade. These books are easily as good as the best Thieftaker books, but the Fearsson series, for whatever reason, never took off the way Thieftaker did. Hence, few people know about the Fearsson books, and it’s a shame, because these two volumes especially include some of the best writing I’ve ever done.
Same with the Islevale Cycle trilogy. Time’s Children is the best reviewed book I’ve written, and Time’s Demon and Time’s Assassin build on the work I did in that first volume. But the books did poorly commercially because the series got lost in a complete reshuffling of the management and staffing of the company that published the first two installments. The series died before it ever had a chance to succeed. Which is a shame, because the world building I did for Islevale is my best by a country mile, and the plotting is the most ambitious and complex I ever attempted. Those three novels are certainly among my very favorites.
My “What matters?” series of posts will conclude next Monday, after a Monday Musings post this week that straddled the personal and professional a bit more than usual. In the meantime, I am using today’s Professional Wednesday post to begin pivoting toward the impending release of my new series, a contemporary urban fantasy that delves deeply into Celtic mythology. The series is called The Chalice War, and the first book is The Chalice War: Stone. It will be released within the next month or so, and will be followed soon after by the second book, The Chalice War: Cauldron, and the finale, The Chalice War: Sword.
I finished the book and showed it to my agent. She liked it a lot, but thought it needed work. She was right, of course. But by that time, I had signed the contracts for Robin Hood and the Thieftaker books. Not too long after, I finally sold the Fearsson series to Baen Books and so had that trilogy to get through.
But I never forgot my Celtic urban fantasy, or its heroes Marti and Kel. When I had some spare time, I went back and rewrote the book, incorporating revision notes from friends and from my agent with my own sense of what the book needed. I rewrote it a second time a couple of years later, and having some time, started work on a second volume, this one set in Australia (where my family and I lived in 2005-2006). I stalled out on that book about two-thirds of the way in, but I liked what I had. By then, though, I was deeply involved with the final Thieftaker books and the Fearsson series. And I was starting to have some ideas for what would become the Islevale trilogy.
Around that same time, I was also reading submissions for the Temporally Deactivated anthology, my first co-editing venture. Last year I opened my freelance editing business, and a year ago at this time, I was editing a manuscript for a client.
Last week, I wrote about planning out my professional activities for the coming year. This week, I want to discuss a different element of professional planning. My point in starting off with a list of those projects from past years is that just about every year, I try to take on a new challenge, something I’ve never attempted before. I didn’t start off doing this consciously — I didn’t say to myself, “I’m going to start doing something new each year, just to shake things up.” It just sort of happened.
As it turns out, these new challenges have brought me to a place where I can say, in all candor, that I have never been happier in my work than I am now. Each time I try something new, I reinvigorate myself as a creator. I force myself out of the tried-and-true, the comfortable. With each of the new projects I mentioned above I had a moment of doubt. I wondered if I was capable of accomplishing what I set out to do. Now, I’m a pretty confident guy when it comes to my writing chops and my ability to help others improve their writing, so those doubts didn’t last long. But they were there each time.
But those new challenges did more than that. They kept my professional routine fresh. I am a creature of habit. I try to write/edit/work every day, so in a general sense, my work days and work weeks don’t change all that much. By varying the content of my job — by writing new kinds of stories and expanding my professional portfolio to include editing as well as writing — I made the routine feel new and shiny and exciting. And at the same time, these new projects made it possible to return to some old favorites, notably the Thieftaker series, with renewed enthusiasm.