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@authortirrell
Every Wound Has an Ancestry
I have spent some time beating myself up for not finishing Absolution of the Morning Star sooner. The series was moving along nicely. Four books were complete, and only two remained. I knew where the story was heading, even if some of the roads were still obscured. Then I got sidetracked by Koen. At first, Koen: Quills from the Raven’s Nest was meant to be a single prequel. Koen had always…
Flashback Fridays #7
I skipped a bunch of posts about my writing plans and progress in editing The Slaying of the Bull. They are interesting to me in a documentation way, but since many of those plans changed and The Slaying of the Bull wasn’t the hit I thought it would be at the time, I won’t bore you with all that. I chose the post below as it is still relevant. In this week’s look to the past, I talk about how…
Chasing the Current
Sylvanus: Swords and Sons has now crossed 60,000 words, placing me roughly at the midpoint of the novel. After a long and arduous journey, Sylvanus and his remaining companions are preparing to cross into the Northlands and enter the realm of his brother, Koen. It is a major transition in the story, but also in Sylvanus himself. The man approaching the border is not the same prince who left…
Flashback Fridays #6
In this week’s look to the past, I focus on the moment I received my first novel in hand. True to the nature of my life, it had a bumpy road getting there (it was a premonition of my future struggles with Amazon), but when it finally arrived, it was something special. Finishing a book is a triumph, but when it becomes a physical object, it possesses a magic that is hard to convey. Most of my…
The Places That Surprise Us
Chicago was never high on my list of places to visit. I had imagined it as something like New York: crowded, gritty, dirty, and weighed down by the age of an old northern city. Large cities are not usually my preferred destinations anyway, so while I was curious about Chicago, I did not arrive with great expectations. I was wrong. Chicago was cleaner and more beautiful than I expected. It had…
Flashback Fridays #5
By mid-April of 2020, two weeks into this journey, I began to realize that self-publishing the first novel I’d written, Vril, wasn’t a good idea (at least not yet). In the posts below, I began transitioning to reworking The Slaying of the Bull, the fourth book I wrote, and eventually the second book I decided to self-publish via Amazon KDP. I began writing this book in the transition period…
Writing in the Gray
I have never been all that interested in stories that divide the world neatly into good and evil. I hope that if you have read my work, it is immediately apparent. That may sound strange coming from a dark fantasy author. My books are filled with tyrants, monsters, witches, fallen powers, corrupted faiths, ancient evils, and people who do horrific things in the name of empire, survival, love,…
Flashback Fridays #4
This week’s look into the past was published on April 11, 2020. At that point, it had been exactly a month of COVID isolation, which is why I chose it. It seems like forever ago, but what a strange time that was. Up until that point, working from home was rare for me. It all changed so quickly. I remember the tension building, the rumors, the fear. My wife had just come back from a work trip to…
Koen is home
After nine months of being traditionally published with Grendel Press, the rights for Koen: Quills from the Raven’s Nest have reverted back to me. I have already republished the book via KDP without incident. I was even able to keep my reviews, which was something I was very concerned about. To give the book the new life it deserves, I also updated the cover so that it will settle in nicely with…
Flashback Fridays #3
This week’s look into the past was originally published on April 9, 2020. I skipped over about a week of posts that were mainly about how the Island of Stone was performing in that first week after publishing. I chose the post below because it gives some insight into how that particular book rose from the ether. It all came down to being burned out researching for my early, historically based…
Five Years, New Covers, and a Homecoming
I wrote a longer reflection back in May about five years of Dawn of the Lightbearer. That was the month I first placed the book up for preorder, and in many ways, that was when the Lucardian journey began for me. Though I might have jumped the gun a little, as the book officially went live on July 2, 2021. So yes, I am celebrating again. Five years ago, Erikson Gray walked into the forbidden…
Flashback Fridays #2
Here we are again with another blast from the past. Below is my second ever blog post from April 4, 2020. I had just published Island of Stone and I had not yet built up the writing momentum or the courage to start a new project, so I was looking through my old catalog of manuscripts that I wrote in my twenty’s to see which one to publish next. At this point, I thought that was going to be Vril,…
Feeding the Future
I have a dark creature on my back. Something old and cloying has wrapped itself around my neck and learned the shape of my thoughts. It hangs there with its mouth near my ear, whispering in a voice that sounds too much like my own. It tells me what is wrong. It tells me what is unfair. It tells me what has not worked, what has not arrived, and what has not been given. For a long time, I mistook…
Flashback Fridays #1
I have made 378 blog posts since I started this writing journey. The very first post was on April 3, 2020, soon after the publication of the Island of Stone. It was a shout into the void, and many of those earlier musings had little to no audience. Looking back, I think some of them were pretty good, and some I completely forgot about. In any case, they help capture the ups, downs, and sideways…
Stepping Beyond Lucardia
I have lived in Lucardia for five years. That is a strange thing to write, because Lucardia is not real. Not in the common sense. You cannot point to it on a map. You cannot buy passage there by ship or rail. You cannot walk its roads unless I build them first. And yet, in the ways that matter to me, I have lived there. I have walked through its forests and cities. I have stood in its churches…
Quick update
Yes, I missed my usual Saturday post. My in-laws are visiting again from China this summer, and we took them on a road trip across upstate New York to Cleveland. On Saturday, I was in Rochester, NY, on our way back. It was a 1,700-mile round-trip journey, which is nothing to sneeze at. We saw some beautiful country, had a lot of laughs, and had plenty of adventures. The trip helped validate some…
The Road Is the Story
I have never been very interested in destinations. That might sound strange coming from someone who writes fantasy, because fantasy is full of destinations. Towers. Cities. Mountains. Lost kingdoms. Temples buried under old stone. A throne that must be reached. A gate that must be opened. A relic that must be found. A monster that must be slain. But the destination is not really the point. The…