Back In the Saddle

I've been away from this blog for a while now, mainly due to a constant and pervasive exhaustion pretty much every minute that I'm awake. This morning I'm feeling a little bit better, so I decided to take a few minutes that throw some updates at you.

An interesting one is that I've started a fan page on Facebook, where I take on the role of Kvothe, the main character from Patrick Rothfuss's books. It's fun, and I (or rather, he) have (has) a little over 300 fans as of this writing. I did it for fun and as a way to organize some fundraising for Mr. Rothfuss' Worldbuilders drive later this year, and the fans seem to like it. You can check it out here.

Because of the above mentioned exhaustion, work on my current novel has ground to a halt. I've gotten very little done on it lately, and that annoys me. I'm so distracted by the overwhelming urge to sleep all the time that gathering my wits about me enough to write well is very hard. It's about all I can manage to work on Living With the Dead, and after I get done posting there most days I feel like I've just finished doing calculus for an hour. Maybe I should see a doctor...

...because I have been very encouraged by my recent sales. I expect April to be a lot slower than March was, but March was another milestone month for me. I broke the $1000 mark in sales for the first time, and broke the 400 copies sold mark as well, which I've been close to for a while. Unless I get a big surge in sales this month, it's looking like I won't do quite that well for April, but that's OK. I know that there will be peaks and valleys, and I just hope that enough of my readers will still be waiting patiently when I finally get done with my current work in progress.

The book I'm working on right now, my vampire novel tentatively titled "Beautiful", feels like some of my best work. Not necessarily in depth, but for sheer entertainment value. Not that I consider the book shallow by any means; I don't. I've just made a real effort to avoid the philosophizing that most of my other work is so heavy on and focus on making the characters deal more with what's going on around them.

On thing about Beautiful that I can say for sure: it's funny as hell. That wasn't my intention at the start of the story, but since I'm taking a similar approach to the characters as I do with Living With the Dead, and basing them off of me and the people I know, funny stuff just tends to creep in. I started reading over a bit of the story the other day, and it made me laugh. Which is a good sign, since I'm the one that wrote it.

That's about all I have for right now, everyone. If you do check out the Kvothe page on Facebook, make sure to "like" it if you're interesting in some daily laughs by yours truly, and want to keep an eye out for a few neat fundraising things I'll be doing over the next several months.

For example:

In the next few days (as soon as I can find it), I will be auctioning off a signed hardback copy of "The Walking Dead" deluxe edition volume one. Series creator and writer Robert Kirkman even drew a little zombie inside the cover. All proceeds from the auction will go to Worldbuilders later this year. I'll be auctioning off some other stuff throughout the year as well.

One thing I plan on doing soon is offering a BIG giveaway of some of my eBooks to anyone that wants them, with a few caveats: one is that anyone who wants a free copy when I do this promotion has to promise to download it on a certain day. I'm hoping that if enough people do that, it will give my sales rank a nice boost on Amazon, which frankly I need right now. The other neat part is that if a certain number of people request their free copies, I will donate a certain amount of extra money to Worldbuilders this year. I don't have it set in stone just yet, but we'll say for every ten copies requested, I'll donate an extra five bucks. Something like that.

I'll post details when the time comes, along with an email address that people can send their requests to. Until then, I'll do my best to keep you all updated.