Gravel crunched under my truck’s tires as we rolled up Ray’s long driveway in the dying light of the next day. Eryn was half asleep in the passenger seat, her head lolling against the window. It had been a long day. There had been a lot of questions in the Forth Police Department. A lot. And no surprise, really. They had a missing kid, bleached human bones, a weird pile of ash and greasy rags, three very traumatized teenagers, gunshots, and two people from out of town who weren’t terribly forthcoming as to what they were doing there with the kids or what they’d been shooting at. Any cop worth his or her salt would be inclined to throw everybody in jail until they had answers. Fortunately, we were saved a lot of time and heartburn by a curious side-effect of the hag’s spell. While the kids had appeared comatose, they were in fact completely aware of their surroundings the entire time. Hags are cruel creatures.
First Draft is Done
And, after 4,633 words worth of key-pounding today, I brought the first draft to a close. It’s slightly longer than Alone and Unafraid, before editing, and my books tend to get slightly longer as editing goes on. Whew. A 123,455-word manuscript knocked out in sixty-five days. I think I’m getting more practiced at this. It’s still coming out on June 23rd. For the Kindle readers, please go ahead and preorder (I’ll be getting the Nook and iBooks preorders up later; the manuscript has to be a bit further along before I can get it through the vetting process to get them on those platforms). The reason I’m pushing the preorders is because they all hit at midnight the day it comes out. That gives the book a good spike on Amazon’s stats, which gets it more visibility. It’s one of the little tricks independent authors need to learn to actually get somewhere. Now I’m going to go let my brain dribble out of my ear for a bit before I start editing…
First Draft Done
The first draft of Nightmares is done. It’s slightly longer than A Silver Cross and a Winchester. It’s out to the Alpha Readers, and I’ll start in on editing in the next day or so. Giving the brain a bit of a break. Hopefully, I should be able to have it up for Kindle pre-order in the next couple of days. Next up, Hard Target (working title; if something else comes up as better, it’ll change, just like Hunting in the Shadows did). Huge amount of research going into this one; it’s an AO I’m not personally familiar with, and touching on some big-time, heavy duty global concepts. Lotta work. Can’t wait to get started. Meanwhile, a little snippet from Nightmares: I don’t know how I hadn’t seen this bad boy before; he was almost a head taller than the rest, broad-shouldered and thick-limbed, with a massive pair of curling ram’s horns rising from his skull. He stamped the ground and roared a challenge. The bleating tone to the roar kind of took away from the effect a little. He threw his arms wide and stamped again, dropping his head to charge. I shot him center chest. Dan’s shot was