Just wanted to update anyone planning on attending my keynote at the Idaho Library Association conference in Soda Springs–I had the wrong location and time. The correct location and time are below. See you there.
Keynote Speech
Southeast & Eastern Idaho Library Association Conference
DATE AND TIME
Friday, April 30th, 10 AM
LOCATION
Tigert Middle School
250 E 200 S
Soda Springs, ID 83276-1412
(208) 547-4922
I just finished chapter 50 and am heading into the climax sequence. I have only 9 chapters left, and they should go fast. Right now I’m at 170,000 words. I’m going to finish a little over my target word length, but I don’t think it’s anything I can’t edit back down.
In this book, Talen has to deal with the fact that he was fashioned to be a tool. Sugar gets some kick-butt skills. There’s a little romance. We also get to meet the woodikin, only mentioned in book one, and their wasp lords, as well as a new character named Harnock, who is a sleth blended by Lumen for battle. There are other bit characters: a woman who reminds me of the Wife of Bath and a some sleth from the Old World. The Bone Faces come back in force. And you get to find out what happens to Nettle. Lots of great stuff. I really think those who liked Servant of a Dark God are going to enjoy this.
Oh, yeah. And the Dogmen of Toth, some nasty pieces of work.
Devon Dorrity, who helped me put together my covers, just helped me put together some business cards. I’m pretty excited about them. I’m biased, but I think they look awesome.
Servant
Curse
Raveler
You can see here a mockup of how they’ll look. That bit on the back is the Blacksword Books logo.
I’m not sure about the one for Bad Penny. Devon liked it. Any opinions?
Mark your calendars!!
The free, 2009 Life, the Universe, and Everything symposium at BYU will run Thursday – Saturday, February 19 – 21.
The speical guests are Tracy & Laura Hickman (Dragonlance authors) and James C. Christensen (yes, the amazing fantasy artist). But there will be more than a dozen other authors there, including: L.E. Modesitt, Brandon Mull, James Dashner, Brandon Sanderson, David Farland, Mette Ivie Harrison, Eric James Stone, Howard Tayler, and a number of others.
Here’s what I’ll be doing:
If you want to write fiction, you’ll want to attend the workshop. And if you’ve attended the workshop before, know that I’ve made some significant updates to the workshop content for 2009. I’m always learning, and so each time I teach this I’m able to provide more insight.
You’ll also want to carefully review the whole schedule. There are tons of panels with professional authors on them that are going to be both useful and interesting to writers.
My workshop focuses on three incredibly important things. In the beginning, I didn’t know these key things, and that ignorance stymied all my writing efforts for years. Once I learned them, the way was opened. There was still a lot of work involved. But these principles increased my output of quality material 1000% (literally). The principles allowed me to write the story that got me my current three-book contract from Tor.
I’ve taught it now more than a dozen times to all sorts of fiction writers and they’re telling me they’re finding it very useful. You’re going to love this stuff, and I always enjoy sharing what I’ve learned with other writers. The three things are:
It’s a highly interactive workshop. Again, the whole symposium, including the workshop, is free. I don’t know another place where you can learn from so many professionals for such a great price.
Hope to see you there!!
So I signed the contracts and put them in the mail today–I’m officially doing a collaboration with Larry Correia.
This is an extension of the novel that we sketched for the 2015 LTUE presentation we did together called “How to Build an Action Plot.”
Basically we took pirates and smugglers, put them in space, added in a nice helping of giant robots, huge aliens, space ships, nasty warlords, organized crime, and a government you don’t want to mess with, then stirred.
It’s going to rock.
You can see the materials for the presentation here. And read more about the collaboration in Larry’s post.
Please note that we started our novel sketch by asking Larry’s ten-year-old son, “Hey, what’s awesome?”
He replied without hesitation, “Giant robots, bandits, and murderers.”
And we took it from there.
