Some of you may be unable to find my books on Amazon.com currently or read them on your kindle. This is because my account is currently suspended for a ridiculous reason which is actually quite frustrating. I am trying to contact amazon kdp at the moment but their contact us page just leads me directly back to the homepage and I can only wait for them to reply to my email. I have copied the content of my reply below to show you what I mean.
Category / From me to you
Current Status (Book finished-ish)
I really hate too many post on updates and not chapters, but I can’t keep hiding from you all because I’ve been reading and not writing. Seriously, I know how you feel when you need just one more chapter.
Anyway, here is the current status.
I’ve had quite some problems getting stuck back into writing, and it all mainly stems from being absent too long. I started the bonus chapter for CotE Vol.2 at the beginning of last month (I think it was), and I couldn’t get past the first paragraph. It’s almost like when you don’t do anything for a long time and forget how to do it.
The Big Update
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Update: Chap 14 – 17 unedited are available on my patreon for everyone. Just click on the link and follow it there ^.^ No sign up required. That’s the end of this book, all that’s left is a bonus chapter, consistency checks for names etc which I ended up changing half way through, and battle edits pre chap 11.
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So many of you are worried. I am here to tell you, there is no need to!
I originally wanted to post this once I had finished Chronicle of the Eternal Volume 2, but I’ve been busy the past couple of days and haven’t had the chance to finalize the writing. I only have half the final chapter remaining plus the bonus chapter. Here is what has been happening.
As many of you know, before I disappeared, my brother had been living with me and I we were looking for a new house. Well, we got a new house! But this is where everything also started going wrong.
Here in Australia, we have a new type of internet rolling out called the National Broadband Network(NBN). I contacted my isp in regards to changing address, and they informed me that I can’t continue on a landline and need to transfer over to the NBN. I don’t understand why when a phone line is still connected to the house but they were adamant on the fact. I even had to buy a new router as their branded router that was NBN ready is apparently not compatible with the NBN – I raged at them pretty hard over this.
I was also assured that the transfer would be 3 – 5 business days to complete then my internet would be ready. I didn’t have a problem with this as it wasn’t a significant deal. Little did I know that that was a big fat lie.
Ignoring the nitty details, The NBN is installed and run by a single company called NBNCO, who are massively understaffed with technicians and services are extremely poor. Customers can’t even contact them to ask what is going on.
It took over 3 months for me to finally get working internet again! That’s the main crux of the problem, I simply have had no internet.
While I’m sure there are methods around this and I could have done better to find internet elsewhere, it wasn’t the only problem I ran into. I have had no money and have been struggling to look for work in order to pay rent. My bank keeps singing Lunchmoney Lewis to me which, whilst being a funny analogy, is quite serious.
My Microsoft Office subscription also ran out not long after moving house. If any of you don’t know what happens in that scenario, Microsoft Word basically becomes Adobe Reader. You can view files, but you can’t do anything else. I had no money to renew it at the time, and no internet to renew it through!
I’ve had internet for about the past three weeks, and have been working on getting back into the rhythm of writing, but it is a gradual process to find the state of mind you were in previously.
Nowadays, I have been getting stuck into writing more. I do have six kids running around the house Friday evening to Monday morning which can be quite distracting (I am the easiest person to become distracted in the world), but I am getting there.
That’s why, I do apologize for being slow, but you don’t have to worry about me dropping the series or anything like that. No matter the speed, it will still be coming… eventually. Anyway, I’m hoping CotE Vol. 2 will be published between 1 – 2 weeks, after which I will be getting stuck into End Online.
Well that is my status update and rage at the world ^.^ I would like to give a personal thank you to everything who has stuck with me and supported me through Patreon, there was one month I was VERY short on rent and the money accumulated helped me make up the remainder. The remaining unedited chapters of CotE will be published there this evening, as well as being sent to my editors.
D
Short Update and Recommendation
As many of you are probably already aware, I hate filling my blog up with updates and not chapters, even more so than I hate going back over what I have already written. Updates always sound like excuses to me, and there isn’t really anything good about excuses.
Here is the update on what’s been happening now that I’ve finished chapter 13!!
I went through a rough time at the end of last year, which also lead to an extremely bad habit of binge reading. What is recent ironically happened on the same day as I posted the last few chapters of CotE onto my wordpress. I was a nice long sleep after it when I woke up to my brother knocking on my front door, needing a couch to sleep on because his marriage, which had hit the fan long ago, had finally turned into intergalactic war with a progression speed comparable to Gurren Lagann.
For me, I can only write without distractions (such as facebook/youtube videos, reading… mainly reading). I had finally partially broken the habit of binge reading and had started a system of spending the mornings getting all those great novels out of my system and writing in the afternoon/evening. This was starting to work. But now that my brother is staying here (along with his kids 3 or 4 nights a week) I find this free time I now had to write worry free is now full of more distractions.
My brother likes to talk a lot (which is good in helping him through this tough time) and the kids are often very active, so my single track mind finds it extremely difficult to focus on writing with the additionals. An example of this is that from 50% of chapter 13, I have only been able to end up writing an average of 500words/day. The rest of the time I haven’t been able to concentrate. Chapter 14 is planned already, and once I get started on it tomorrow, I will update the top of this post with the status. I hope I can aim for 1000words/day as I want to try push myself, and considering I will turn poor if I don’t write very soon, I really need to drop a few novels and do even less reading.
That is all. I also have a short novel recommendation for anyone who hasn’t read it yet. It is Demon Girl ~ Tale of a Lax Demon ~ (Link to novel updates by clicking on the text). It is truly an ingenious piece of work, albeit being slightly short. It only have 4 volume of approximately 16 chapters each, with a continuation of 89 chapters (It was a redo of the sequal, but I’m not as much of a fan of it because I was reading google translate of the raws and despite understanding it, I found the ingenuity lacking for a short story). The translation of the first story is currently into the fourth volume, so there is a decent amount of reading material.
The ideal part of the above story which truly sets it apart is the unlikely combination of its cuteness, fluffiness, and the occasional texas chainsaw massacre. Well, that is actually a little vague because I don’t want to spoil anyone who hasn’t read it before, but I strongly encourage that you give it a try. P.S The novel is hosted at moonbunnycafe, and they can occasionally have really annoying ads, at least on a tablet anyway.
I’m Back! (Never really left)
First Agenda: Current Status
Here I am, feeling bright and refreshed. Since my post on suffering from depression, things have become much better. First of all, thank you to everyone who offered me their support and best wishes. While I may not have replied to comments and have appeared to have vanished, I have been here the entire time and have read them as they came in.
An update on my condition, my depression has lifted its grip on me. It truly does feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. The only bad news was that the medication didn’t do anything for me! It was actually quite frustrating to be honest. In the end, I ended up taking a classic R&R period to allow myself to forget everything that has been causing stress (Mainly self made writing deadlines, money to pay rent, etc…)
Ascended Kings & CotE Paperback Winners
CotE Paperback Giveaway:
A quick shoutout to the winners of the Chronicle of the Eternal Paperback Giveaway I did a while ago. My previous post is self explanatory as to why this came so late, but I still believe I could have done better.
There wasn’t just three winners, but four. I also had an additional book available for givaway on Patreon for those who have been patient and supported me there. The winners are:
Mal, UK
yalc2, USA
Liam T, AUS
Michael B, USA
I also sent out a copy each to the illustrator, editors, and finally one for Christofer R who did an incredible End Online Soundtrack a while back. The books were posted a month ago, maybe longer, so you should have all received them by now
Ascended Kings:
Firstly, no, this is not a new novel! This is something I hope you will all take a moment to read and consider.
The artist for the cover of Chronicle of the Eternal, Dylan Pierpont, has been a part of a team to create a new board game that seems considerably interesting. I know how good his artwork is, so I already know that it will be an excellent looking item.
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Stealing the description for the board game as I can’t think:
In the game of Ascended Kings®, you have been set with an ultimatum; face each King in combat to the death or let Empyrnea and all you hold dear, fall. You and up to three other players each choose from one of the Ascended Kings® and take to the arena… prepared to decide the fate of all, on the outcome of a single battle.
The Ascended Kings® board game is a high fantasy battle royal game with no player elimination and includes miniatures, cards, dice, and gemstones. As walls of fire close in around the combatants, the Kings engage in free for all combat to the death—their sights set on taking the bloodstones from their rival Kings. As Kings fall, players are reborn in the fight as powerful entities known as Revenants. Regardless of the number of times a Revenant falls, it will continue to return to the fight, allowing each player the opportunity to win until the very end. The Omega Stone, fabled to hold ultimate power, will be revealed to the King or Revenant able to possess all four bloodstones.
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I will be supporting this project and help funding the kickstarter they have going, and I hope some of you can as well. I have included a link to the kickstarter, which also has a video introduction of the game along with all other information.
I dislike asking you to do things, but would someone also please post and let everyone know about it on the litRPG facebook group. Dylan is a good friend of mine so I want to be able to help spread the word, but as I only have a facebook account with my real name (because D is apparently an invalid first name) I would rather remain in the shadows.
Thank you for your time!
Personal Announcement: Depression
The first of two announcements, and the most important one. This is very difficult for me to say, and takes more courage than when I published my first chapter of End Online and left it to the masses to chew apart, and chew you all did. This is because I have never been someone to open up to others, and have always done my best to solve my own problems without involving others.
I know that many of you have been wondering where I am, what I have been doing, and why I haven’t followed through when I say I will do something. I understand that this can be incredibly frustrating, and I can assure you no one feels it more than me.
Over the past two months, perhaps longer (I’m not too sure as my memory fails in many departments) I have been stricken with chronic fatigue. I have spent most of my time in bed, often only awake for 6 or 10 hours a day. Even during my waking hours, I had no energy. I spent many of my days struggling to stay awake as tiredness wouldn’t leave me. I’m not talking about yawning and wandering around like a zombie, but physically struggling to keep my eyes open at times.
It was near the end of last month that I started having random headaches and panic attacks. I would stand outside in my backyard looking up at the stars and feel like the sky is coming crashing down onto me and that there is an impending doom coming. I didn’t know they were panic attacks at the time, but I could tell something was seriously wrong, so I went to the doctors the next day.
Writing Style
I have a question for you all that I would like some feedback on. I have also created a poll for those who don’t have any particular remarks to comment but favour one opinion over another.
As many know, or have noticed, I write in the present state, save for events that have already happened. I grew into this style early on when I started writing. During the initial feedback from readers, there was one about “showing not telling”, along with some examples. I found it puzzling at first and was comparing the examples with my work, and also doing research on the subject.
I have learned about it now, but at the time, I had taken it as writing in the present tense was “showing” (involving the reader in the action as it’s happening) where as writing in the past tense was “telling” (telling the reader about what happened). I often mistook verbs back then and wrote as a jumbled mess of both present and past tense. Thankfully weakwithwords, then genericIntent, came along and helped me fix most of it in the editing process.
Chronicle of the Eternal Cover Art and Announcement
With Volume 1 of Chronicle of the Eternal current going through Amazon’s reviews, and will be live soon, I thought now would be a good time for this.
First of all, the cover art I have subtly hinted to as being amazing from time to time. The cover art was produced by Dylan Pierpont, a good friend of mine and an amazing artist. He has his own website www.dylanpierpont.com where you can have a look at some of his work.
Normally I would make the images smaller in the posts, but that would be an injustice in this case.
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My second piece of news is something I haven’t really told anyone as of yet, but I came to the conclusion that I should tell you all.
News Update
I thought to update you all on several new things, and as it isn’t just a minor piece of news or two, I created its own post to grab your attention.
Part 1:
First of all, I am incredibly excited to announce the page views. I have been waiting patiently for the past month for this blog to reach a million views. I’m not some super conglomerate website, like wuxiaworld – that has recently, very recently, updated the fact that they have now reached 500 million page views, or other massively popular fan translation sites. But to someone like me, a million views is an incredibly big deal to me.
Considering I started End Online as a hobby during unemployment, without the slightest intention or idea I would make it my full time career, a million views back them was smoke and mirrors within a dream.
End Online Novel 