Coming Soon--"Dark Hour"!

I'm pleased to announce that the third and final installment in my The Coming Evil Trilogy is due out early next year. Not only that, but it is titled Dark Hour, and here's the cover!

This series of "Christian Horror" books has been a dream of mine for a very long time now. It's always been my desire to write about that battle between fear and faith, good and evil, God and Humankind's Rebellious Attitude.

The Coming Evil Trilogy follows the struggles of the small town of Greensboro. Ever since the highway moved, the once prosperous town has fallen on hard times and abandoned their collective faith. The barriers of protection that gaurded this small town for over a hundred years has fallen and their apathy has paved the way for a terrifying devil--enigmatically called "The Strange Man"--to make his move.

In the last two books of the Trilogy (The Strange Man, Enemies of the Cross), the Strange Man has been moving pieces of his diabolical puzzle into place to bring about the Dark Hour. With the publication of Book Three early next year, the Strange Man's plans will come to fruition.

There is hope, though. A small group of Christians is beginning to wake up and lay hold of the faith they have taken for granted for far too long. The odds are impossibly stacked against them, but through perseverence, friendship, family, and love, they must stand against the Strange Man and his army of monsters.

Realms has been instrumental in helping me realize this dream, publishing the first two books in the Trilogy. For the last installment, Splashdown Books will be handling publicshing duties, building upon the top notch quality that Realms began and seeing this series to its dramatic end. I hope you all will come on board for this wild ride through the depths of darkness and to the heights of hope.

Check out my original announcement for Dark Hour on my blog, and, if you've yet to jump into The Coming Evil Trilogy, Books One and Two are on sale in your favorite bookstore, as well as online and in Kindle and Nook formats.

Covers!

One of the most exciting parts of the writing process is seeing your cover for the first time. This past week has been a crazy time on the cover front!

First of all, I received a letter from Realms that they were gearing up to create the cover for Dark Hour--the third and final installment of The Coming Evil Trilogy.

As one publisher works on that, I get word from my other publisher--Hasslein Books--that artist Pat Carbajal has produced this dynamic cover for my upcoming unofficial guide to the Back to the Future franchise. The book's not even finished yet, and I already have a cover! How great is that?!



And if all of that wasn't enough, even while I'm drooling over Pat's art, I get Thomas Mason's stunning rendering of the cover for Rift Jump--my next release, coming this summer from Splashdown Darkwater!



I feel incredibly blessed to have such talented artists working on my books. Now if I can just make the books half as cool as all these covers!

The Joy (and Terror) of Editing

These days I’ve got my nose to the grindstone, hard at work on editing my third novel—Rift Jump—due out this summer from Splashdown Darkwater. Getting back edits on your novel is something akin to being sound asleep in the security of your ability, only to have some objective third party douse you with a pail of cold, harsh reality. There’s the knee-jerk anger (How dare they tell me I have a POV problem—it’s supposed to be that way!), quickly followed by self-pity and defeat (Oh, they’re right. I’m a terrible writer). It’s a familiar roller coaster and I suspect it’ll never get any easier. But, if you can tough it out through the first few stages of Writer Denial, you finally come to a weird sort of euphoria. You begin to look at your work as objectively as you can and start cutting away the unnecessary parts. Little by little, you’re left with this little gem.

Is it perfect?

An emphatic “NO”. When I began this writer thing, I was convinced that I would get to a point where my craft was honed. I’m talking like a deadly point, able to obliterate through all editorial critique, and pierce the heart of every reader with the ring of truth.

It doesn’t work like that. There is always, and I mean always, room to grow. It’s a hard lesson. Not just because you realize you have so much more learning to do, but because you look back at earlier works and see them for all their flaws.

With every editorial process, I learn something about myself. I see faults in my craft, and holes are punched in my most beloved stories. I don’t love them any less, though I might be a little more reluctant to share them with people out of my self-conscious paranoia :p But all I can do is move forward, trying with every book to be the best I can be, and hoping that I don’t embarrass myself too much along the way.

Once the euphoria of forging a tighter manuscript begins to fade, I’m usually left with a new feeling. One that brings me joy and terror.

The last minute rewrite. 

I sit there, cradling my creative baby, realizing that this will be the last time I read over this manuscript. This will be the last time I edit it, the last time I think about it, the last time I work on it. Then it’ll be out of my hands, off to the printer, and into the homes of readers to dissect her or discard her (or maybe, if I’m really blessed, love her). And, undoubtedly, after I’ve spent some time away from the manuscript and have worked on a plethora of other projects, I come back to it afresh with—gasp!—new ideas. I’ve thought of a subplot I want to add. I’ve thought of a character I want to elaborate on. I’ve thought of more dialogue, more scenes—better scenes! There’s that moment of joy that my imagination has been sparked, and I’ve rediscovered these characters and their world! Then there settles the fear of adding and subtracting. What if that new subplot is stupid? What if adding that scene completely alters the course of the story? What if everything was fine the way it was? What if I submit it to the printer and THEN get a “brilliant” idea that I must add?! What if, what if, what if!

It’s hard letting our babies go. But it’s a part of life and a part of the writer’s life. Ultimately we have to do our best and send them out into the world, trusting that we’ve given them everything they’ll need to succeed. I've been tinkering with Rift Jump since I was fifteen years old or so--it's time to let her go. Will she be without flaw? Never. But I'll still love her, just as I love all my babies. I hope you will too, warts and all :)