Smitey Heroes Stories

The last Smitey Heroes Story: A Giant Tale of Legendary Feats has been published on Amazon! (Checks back at last post, which was about the first Smitey Heroes Story. Realizes that blogging is not a strong suit.)

So it's time for a recap. My wife Alex and I created a card game called Smitey Heroes. We launched a Kickstarter to raise money to print the game. We didn't quite make it, but we learned a lot from the experience and will try again. (Hopefully learning from past mistakes. That may be a blog post soon.)

I enjoyed the characters of the game so much that I decided to write 10 short stories about them. So, in the last couple months, we have written and published 10 Smitey Heroes Stories.

They are: The Four Squires, A Suitor for the Princess, The Grossest Dragon, Dragon Mountain, Peasant Poison Pony, A Hobby for the Good Queen, the Valley of Mythical Beasts, A Dark Dark Plot, The Worst Winter, and A Giant Tale of Legendary Feats.

They're fun and lighthearted, much like the card game.

In addition to creating the e-books, I've been experimenting with creating audiobooks from the stories, and the first ten will be printed as a paperback. All in all, it's been very exciting and we've learned a lot.

Smitey Heroes

The new short story Smitey Heroes: The Four Squires is up on Amazon. Based on the soon to be Kickstarted card game, this fun little tale tells the story of Four Identical Quadruplets who become the four Smiteyest Squires in all the land.



Buy "Smitey Heroes: The Four Squires" Today!

The Past Year

It’s been almost a year since the last blog post, where I wrote that the rough draft of Navance #3 was finished. As of today, it is published. Which begs the question: what took so long?

Part of the delay is that the story took a couple months to finish editing, which (so far) is normal for one of my stories. I’m trying to get better at writing clean first drafts, but I’m still at a stage where significant revisions happen from draft to draft.

Part of the delay was that I immediately jumped into more writing. The travelogue is coming along well, although it has taken more time than I’d anticipated. For fiction, Navance # 4 is written and edited and the title is The Champion of Copurn. I hope to have it out within a week.

Part of the delay is that I did a lot of travelling this year. While I love to travel, it does break up a writing routine. Every trip would kill my productivity even beyond the trip itself, so I need to get better about that.

And part of the delay is that I’ve had a hard time focusing on a single project. There are about 15 projects that are occupying my headspace and it’s easy to spread your efforts thin and have little to show for it. City of Cairns was 99% done for months, but I had mentally already moved on. Which means that I need to get in the habit of zoning in and completing a project before moving on.

With all that being said, I’ve had a really good year, and I’m very excited about the projects I’m working on. Look for Navance #4: Champion of Copurn soon.


Books I’ve read in the past year (by no means a complete list): We the Drowned by Carsten Jensen, Paradise in Chains by Diana Preston, One Summer by Bill Bryson, The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders.

4/26

Finished reading American Gods. It was good.

City of Cairns is in the editing process, and I've started laying out the next story. In addition, I'm making progress on a travelogue of a trip I took at the beginning of the year.

Currently Writing: Navance #4
Currently Reading: The Greatest Knight by Thomas Asbridge

4/15/2017

Finished the first draft of Navance #3, which will be titled the City of Cairns. Been struggling with this one for a while, so it feels good to have it done. Next up will be editing.

Going to knock out a couple short stories before starting on the next Navance.

Currently Writing: Short Story #6
Currently Reading: American Gods by Neil Gaiman

4/13/2017

Wrote a chapter of Navance #3. Getting close to the end, which is exciting.


Currently Writing: Navance #3
Currently Reading: American Gods by Neil Gaiman

4/12

Spent a few hours at the Mercantile Library getting some words in.

I also finished reading the Guns of Avalon by Roger Zelazny today. The Amber books aren't very long individually, and they move quick. The pacing of them is impressive.



Currently Writing: Navance #3
Currently Reading: American Gods by Neil Gaiman