I want to hear from you if you fall into any of the following categories:

1. You’ve run a successful Kickstarter campaign (what incentives worked to get you supporters?)
2. You’ve supported a successful Kickstarter campaign (what incentives got you to support the campaign?)
3. You are a prior reader of Faerie Blood and you want more in the same universe (what would get you to support this campaign?)
4. You haven’t read anything in the Warder universe yet and you want to (same question as previous)

Note that the overall point of this Kickstarter would be to get Bone Walker finished and purchasable in electronic and print formats, with the side bonus of doing a second edition release of Faerie Blood. Thus the things I’d need to pay for would include:

1. Commission of cover art for both books (cost TDB, I have a query out to a potential cover artist)
2. A proper edit pass over Bone Walker (estimated cost $700), since it absolutely must be edited by someone who isn’t me; a query is out to a potential editor
3. Initial setup cost with either Third Place or the University Book Store, depending on who has better rates, to get both books printable on the Espresso Book Machine (estimated cost $150 to set up both books)
4. Cost per book and per page of printing individual copies of both books (cost TDB, as Bone Walker isn’t finished yet, but Faerie Blood would probably run me $2 per book and $.03 per page)

Look behind the fold for my thoughts on potential incentives. I want your feedback on order of incentive levels, combinations of potential incentives, and viable pledge levels for them! Also, if you can think of any really nifty incentives I don’t include here, do please let me know!

Here are my initial thoughts on a rough draft of potential incentives and pledge levels:

$5 or more:

A DRM-free copy of Bone Walker‘s electronic edition, in .mobi, .pdf, and .epub formats, and your name in the Acknowledgements section of that book.

$10 or more:

As above, plus a DRM-free copy of Faerie Blood‘s electronic second edition, in the same formats, and your name in the Acknowledgements section of that book.

$15 or more:

As above, plus a DRM-free copy of the Warder-universe short story “The Blood of the Land”, with new layout and cover art.

$25 or more:

As above, plus a signed print copy of Bone Walker.

$50 or more:

As above, plus a signed print copy of Faerie Blood‘s second edition.

Now, all of the above are incentives I am reasonably confident I can offer. Here are others I could offer if enough extra money is raised:

Since this Kickstarter is specifically for Bone Walker, Book 2 of the projected Kendis/Christopher trilogy, I will be focused on finishing that book. However, enough extra money would also raise the potential of me also doing the as of yet unnamed Book 3, which is projected to take place partly in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and to follow up on the backstory with Christopher’s mother, alluded to in Faerie Blood. This would be the biggest and most important extra potential incentive!

Also there are:

1. The first Warder universe novella, featuring my psychic chick of size who is asked to help find out who murdered the Warder of Providence, Rhode Island. This work is already in progress so would be the first one I’d offer as an extra incentive.
2. The second Warder universe novella, featuring a geeky tuba player who must help a Warder save migrating sea dragons.
3. Warder universe novella #3, featuring the young Millicent Merriweather becoming the Warder of Seattle in 1953.
4. Depending on how things work out with a potential cover artist, I could investigate the idea of prints of cover art.

And in terms of incentives for ridiculously high pledges, I would totally be willing to consider commissioned short stories, novellas, or even full novels set in the time and place of the supporter’s choice, as long as they were within the Warder universe. And I’d totally consider naming characters after supporters as well.

So talk to me, people! How should I improve upon these potential incentives?

Note also: for people who have already purchased Faerie Blood, I don’t want to make you pay for it twice, so I want your feedback on how to make these incentives worth your time as well if I’m going to be offering a second edition of the same book!

I’ve also thrown a few measly words into Chapter 11 of Bone Walker, but not much to speak of. The muse mostly wanted Elizabeth and Ross tonight.

Let’s see what I can do tomorrow. Bed now.

One: it’s okay to have a day here and there when I don’t write anything. There are writers who can churn out several thousand words a day; I am not one of them. I do have a full-time day job, and that does slurp up a considerable amount of my daily ration of Brain. Especially during weeks when I’m running short on sleep, when I’m all thyroid-y, or both. Like this past week. I spent all of Saturday, pretty much, thinking “well gosh I should write something”, and wound up playing a lot of Unwell Mel and watching crappy movies instead.

Two: while it’s okay to have an off-day every so often, I can’t let myself default to that, not if I want to get anything done. So I made a point of writing a page in Bone Walker last night, and tonight, I yoinked some more words out of Chapter 20 of Lament.

I’m not bothering with posting actual numbers tonight, since I’m still sort of sleep-deprived and thyroidal. But this is me saying that yes, for the last two days in a row, Writing Things Did Happen. Slow, small writing things, but as long as they happen, I’ll get there in the end.

So far so good. This is ten days in a row I’ve managed to do something writing-related, and I think part of what’s helping is not having any specific thing to shoot for besides “do something writing-related daily”. It’s the least stress-free goal I’ve been able to think of, and it’s actually helping! I think it also helps to be loose like this since I do have so many different projects vying for my attention; this way, I can latch on whichever one demands my attention the loudest on any given night. (Still though the lion’s share of this attention has got to go to Lament, and I won’t go more than a day or two without poking at it.)

Wish me luck on keeping it up, folks.

Chapter 20 is one of the smaller ones in the last stretch of the book, so I’m not sure yet how much I’ll edit out of it yet. But it’s good to get the momentum going again.

Meanwhile, I’ve pinged my editor serasempre to start the official conversation about what Drollerie and I will be doing next. We do not have official details nailed down by any means. However, interest has been expressed both in Bone Walker and in the shorter pieces set in the Faerie Blood universe.

Which leads me into thinking that Oscar’s story may well wind up in the FB universe now, and and that it could wind up being a novella. That’d work quite a bit for me. I’m thinking that Oscar’s story, Elizabeth and Ross’s story, and Millicent’s origin story would be a lovely trio of things to have in one book.

More on this to come!

In general order of priority, these are the main goals:

1. First and foremost: finish the edit pass on Lament of the Dove and get the revised manuscript back to Carina Press. Current status: Chapter 19 of the word count reduction pass.
2. upstart_crow has given me an anthology invite, so I need to plan out what I’ll be writing for that. This is higher priority right now than either Bone Walker or Queen of Souls, since it’s a solid invite and will mean Actual Albeit Small Cashy Money, assuming the piece is accepted. More on this as events warrant; right now I don’t even have a story idea, and the antho in question is quite a bit far out yet.
3. Follow up with Drollerie as to whether Bone Walker will actually be feasible for Drollerie to pursue this year, and if so, what they need from me to make it happen. Either way, I should go ahead and finish it. Current status: still in chapter 11, and I’m about to the point where I need to plan out what’s going to happen for the rest of the book.
4. Review where I left off with editing Queen of Souls and get that into queryable shape. Current status: still pretty much on Chapter 2 of the second draft.

Everything above and beyond these things is a stretch goal, right now. This includes all of the current notable works in progress, which are:

1. Shadow of the Rook. Current status: Made it into Chapter 4 before serious edits to Lament made it clear the beginning of Shadow will have to be heavily reworked as well. Therefore, Shadow will remain on hold until Lament‘s edits are done.
2. Mirror’s Gate. Current status: Chapter 2.
3. Child of Ocean, Child of Stars. Current status: Interlude between Chapters 3 and 4.
4. Shards of Recollection. Current status: Chapter 1.
5. Still-untitled Faerie Blood-universe piece starring Elizabeth the psychic, and Ross the brother of a murdered Warder. It’s still not clear to me whether this piece is going to be a novella or a novel in its own right. Review of it must occur.

And oh yes: I DO still intend to do the last couple of How to Read Ebooks posts, as well as any further ones that occur to me. If anyone has specific requests about ebook-related things you’d like to see me post, please let me know!

Tonight, I can safely say that editing of Lament has happened. I doublechecked Chapter 18 and realized there was another minor scene with Celoren that I could completely nuke–partly because it didn’t really advance the plot much, and partly because removing it also addressed one of the various issues from Carina’s editor. And I’ve headed into Chapter 19, where I’ve re-discovered that I did leave this chapter in a bit of a mess after cleaning up the tail end of 17. Now I get to clean that mess up.

It’s also become clear that I will indeed be swinging back around for a sixth draft once the word count reduction draft is done. It’ll have to be the sixth draft where I go back in and put in significant new content.

And since I’ve made it a couple of pages into Chapter 19, about 20 minutes shy of midnight, I’ll call that today’s writing-related activity. More tomorrow. DAMMIT.

Edited tonight: Quite a bit, actually
Chapter 18 revised total: 3,750
Chapter 19 revised total: 5,815
Lament of the Dove revised total (fifth draft): 105,783

Spent much of this afternoon setting that up and tweaking a bunch of the settings to get it the way I wanted it. Along with twiddling the theme, I also took the time to sweep through all the pages on the site and update them as best I could, so at this point everything should be current. Most notably, I’ve spun off separate sub-pages for both Faerie Blood and Defiance, on the assumption that if I keep selling material, more of my books will want their own sub-pages. I fleshed out each of these new pages with a bit of an excerpt as well.

And, I updated the In Progress page with a current working version of the blurb for Bone Walker! Here it is:

Two months after the rising of her faerie blood and magic, Kendis Thompson thinks she’s starting to get the hang of her altered life. Along with her boyfriend Christopher MacSimidh, she’s learning magic from Millicent, the senior Warder of Seattle. Christopher’s taking to his long-denied Warder power, and all in all, the two are happily pursuing their relationship.

But nogitsune are prowling the city, on the hunt for a fugitive child with powers of her own–and the Unseelie bard Elessir has escaped from his vengeful queen, bringing with him a curse that lashes out to endanger Kendis’ closest friend. Now she must confront these dual threats to her city and her loved ones, along with the uncomfortable truth that there’s much more to her Seelie heritage than she knows.

It’s only a working draft of a blurb, but hey, it’s an incomplete working draft of a novel, so that’s all good. Hope it piques your interest, folks!

So we’ve got 51 words into Chapter 4 of Shadow of the Rook, which is currently in the middle of an Enverly scene–his first since the events at the end of Lament of the Dove. Let’s just say Father Enverly has had his first actual religious experience, shall we?

Mirror’s Gate is still in Chapter 2, with Yevanya going to have a friendly little chat with her dead husband’s former teacher and colleague, which should set her up nicely to learn some disturbing things about what’s going on in the city of Istra. 57 words to that, and I gotta say, I rather like this fragment:

Genrek was a great hulk of a man, towering over her by many inches, and yet she had never found him anything but amiable in his gruff fashion. She always supposed it was not because he found her fragile and dainty; next to Genrek many things were, such as carriages, hills, and the smaller varieties of bear.

Over in Bone Walker, I’m still in Chapter 11, with Kendis and Christopher about to get hugely distracted from the question of whether Christopher can, in fact, cross Lake Washington. ‘Cause something is about to give them a disturbing little phone call. 52 words there.

And last but not least, in the still untitled Warder-universe story of Elizabeth and Ross, Elizabeth is realizing that she has no business snarking on a man who’s just told her his dead sister was the magical defender of the city. Not when she is, herself, a psychic. 67 words here.

So yeah. 227 words total. Not much overall, but something!

Tonight, at least, I managed to throw words at both Mirror’s Gate and Bone Walker, though, so I’m calling that a win! Still in Chapter 2 on the one and Chapter 11 on the other, but between ‘em I got roughly 500 words tonight. So I call that a win!

Mirror’s Gate:
Written tonight: 267
Chapter 2 total: 2,231
Mirror’s Gate total (first draft): 6,014

Bone Walker:
Written tonight: 293
Chapter 11 total: 682
Bone Walker total (first draft): 30,683

It all means no real major progress in any of it, but at least there was small pointer advancement! We’ll see what I can do today.

Written on Mirror’s Gate, Chapter 2: 157
Written on Bone Walker, Chapter 11: 174
Written on Shards of Recollection, Chapter 1: 150
Written on Child of Ocean, Child of Stars: 26
Written on Shadow of the Rook: 30
Written on Untitled story about Elizabeth, psychic chick of size, and Ross, brother of a dead Warder: 34
Total words written yesterday: 571