After a busy, and sometimes anxiety filled year, it feels good to finally getting back to this. I know I hadn’t posted in a while, but coming back and seeing it has been over a year was shocking to say the least. It was never my intention to disappear without warning or explanation of course, but here we are. With work consuming more and more of my attention early last year, and with complications arising with my wife’s pregnancy (our little guy is fine thankfully), this sort of thing simply fell by the wayside. As much as I wish I had kept things going, I’m sure I made the right choice prioritizing family.
Still, it’s long overdue that I bring you guys up to speed on what I’ve been up to with my book and more generally. With my son turning one today, there’s never been a more perfect time to reflect and contemplate what the road ahead might hold. First and foremost, book two and the supplement.
Book two has been coming along really well actually despite everything, even if I did go on hiatus near the end of last year. I’m deep into the first draft and went on my break right in the middle of writing the climax. It’ll be interesting getting back into things and remembering all the intracacies of what was going on, but it’ll also be fun and rewarding. Fingers crossed things finally clear up at work enough in the next couple weeks. A quick aside, I’m really interested to see what people think of book two. I definitely think it will defy expectations. With one AI causing so much trouble, imagine what two could do… or a whole race of them perhaps?
Next, the supplemental work. A rough draft, really really rough, has been done since early last year, minus all the interesting pictures and diagrams I’m looking to fill it with (hence why it’s so rough). Fortunately, my wife is a fantastic artist and is ready and willing to lend me a hand when it comes to the illustrations. Now, you might be wondering why pictures are making an appearance in the supplement, and all I can say to that is, you’ll have to give it a read. Really though, it’s thanks to it being a sort of history book covering world events between books one and two. I had the idea early on that collages, diagrams, charts, and timelines would be a more entertaining way of communicating the information I wanted to get across rather than leaving it all to plain old prose. Of course, there’s still plenty of words though, it’s not like I’m writing a children’s book here.
On a more tangible note, I’ve been thinking about trying to hold an event near me (northeast suburbs of Indianapolis) to promote the book and meet people interested in giving it a read in person. My plan is to reach out to local bookstores, be they big or small, and see if I can give them a few copies to sell. It would mean little to no income of them of course, but at this stage it’s more about getting copies and the name out in the wild rather than raking in the cash (that’ll come later 😉 ). Besides that, there’s a nearby shop called Donuts and Dragons that would be perfect for a meet and greet/signing. A place run by nerds where you can play games and is dragon themed, I mean come on… Hopefully they think so too and they don’t send me packing.
Finally, my trip to asia. I just came home from an amazing trip with my wife to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. One of the best, most enlightening experiences of my life, I really want to share some of the things I saw (which’ll be a breeze considering how many pictures she took). Going up Taipei 101, seeing Mount Fuji up close an personal, stopping by the DMZ, and much much more, it was like a dream come true. It’s hard to believe it happened and that it’s over. If I was better at social media, my account would be 99% pictures from the trip by now, but that’s just not me. It’ll have to come in another post, but it’ll be worth the wait, I swear. And this time it won’t take a year plus.
The moral of the story, I hope to provide updates (no matter how small) maybe once a week or every other. Book two’s climax is intense to say the least, so it’ll be a productive way to channel all that energy swelling up in my fingers when I write.
Anyway, see you soon.