Wow, a second book. I guess I have to officially start referring to myself as an "author" rather than "a guy who has wrote a book" now.
The Imbued Lockblade has probably been available on Amazon for a long while now actually since it’s been on preorder for the last month or so and waiting for midnight of the 20th to roll around to go live. Hopefully the paperback is also available at this point, though that depends a lot on the Amazon spirits (read: outsourced folks in other countries who do not speak English as a mother tongue, but still find problems with my grammar).
Not kidding, I spent the vast majority of yesterday getting that paperback file in order and have had oral surgeries that were less frustrating, more intuitive, and less bloody than figuring out Amazon’s in-house paperback formatting.
And that’s said by someone who’s already done it once, which cut down the learning curve by 50%. So I guess I only lost one work day getting it together.
Hurray for progress?
Anyways, I’m digressing, which has a lot to do with a certain lack of sleep from a certain someone who will remain nameless. But he has a lot to do with the book coming out when it has.
[removed: two long, rambling paragraphs on personal stuff that really doesn’t pertain]
Anyways, this book took far longer than anything else I’ve ever worked on, which might partially be because of my hubris in bragging I had never suffered from writer’s block before. So, of course, I was stricken by a particularly virulent version in the writing of this book.
Which is particularly surprising since this is the book that I really think broaches all the themes and ideas I want to explore in this series. Don’t get me wrong, I love The Woven Ring and put my all into it, but this is the book where I really get to dig in.
The first cover sketches. The choice was clear to me from the very beginning.
A lot of that is structural, in that book one is really just act one where you have to establish the characters, concept, conflict, etc. (and, you know, tell a somewhat self-contained story over the course of the novel). And, as we all surely know, act two kicks off when the characters really commit to the journey and the true story begins.
In a lot of ways, that really sums up The Imbued Lockblade in that it’s what I consider the “Fun And Games” section of my story. Mainly because I find moral ambiguity and impossible choices enjoyable.
Yeah, I’m weird like that.
Slightly different arm position for Luca here. In case
Slightly different arm position for Luca in this one. And in case anyone cares, his visual inspiration was a mid-90s Rufus Sewell. Because Dark City is still one of my favorite films!
But really, this is where all the ideas I planted in book one begin to spring out of the soil. They’re fragile, and not fully formed yet, but if I tend to them properly in this book and book three (“The Glass Dagger”), I think they’ll bear some particularly wonderful fruit come book four (title under wraps so as not to give too much away).
So yeah, this is all rather rambling and disjointed, and I can’t tell if I ever want to show anyone this post. But I’m putting it up so as to get some form of personal accomplishment. Because, as I was writing this, I got an email from Amazon saying The Imbued Lockblade is now available and all the preorders have been delivered.
Unfortunately for me, it looks like no one actually preordered it.
Hmph.
