I was never really happy with the original Lost Angel cover. I’m delighted to share the new version, which in my opinion, is much better!
The paperback is also getting updated to the new design, while the interior will have better formatting. It’s the little things…
I’m glad to finally have a cover I’m happy with!
I’ve always wanted to have a map of the Wasteland and it’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. Finally, in the year 2020, I got around to doing it.
I’m pleased with the results. I made the map by taking a screenshot from Google Earth. Then, it was a matter of doing some simple stuff with Photoshop. I found the grungy frame on Shutterstock, and I had to learn a few new things to put it together.
I could have added more to it, but some parts were getting pretty crowded. For that reason, I only included locations I mentioned in the series. The only nitpicky thing is Ragnarok Crater is slightly off in location. It should be a bit further northeast.
It sort of reminds me of Mars, with the reddish tint and spreading ice cap. Which was sort of the effect I’m going for. Beginning with Wasteland Chronicles, I wanted to show a planet in transition.
I hope it will help new and old readers alike with envisioning where things are in this universe. So far, I’ve included the map in my box set, and will most likely also include it in the individual books.
I’ve always been a huge map nerd.
I love them in fantasy novels especially. In fact, one of my favorite things about reading fantasy novels are the maps. I could easily stare at them for a long time before even starting the book itself, and often, my impression of the book or series is informed by just how detailed the map is.
Weirdly enough, I love real maps, too, especially antiquated ones. It’s just fascinating to me how cartographers were able to draw them, despite lacking all the modern tools we have.
Unlike fantasy, space-based science fiction doesn’t seem to do as well with maps, or even world building. My biggest pet peeve are “monoworlds”. You see them all the time in sci-fi: planets that just have a single biome and temperature. There’s the Forest World, the Ice World, the Desert World, the Water World, with little no deviation in climate over an entire biosphere, if any at all.
I’m sure it’s possible for there to be worlds like that, maybe even probable, but I would think it would be more likely to have a world where it’s mostly desert, but also to have some wetter parts with a more Mediterranean type of climate. Or in the case of a world cooler than Earth but otherwise mostly the same, it wouldn’t all be necessarily ice and snow, but perhaps have a narrow band of temperate land on the equator where life was possible.
I’ve always known that if I wrote a series in space, I would avoid the sin of making only monoworlds. I want to go beyond that, to make my worlds feel unique and alive – if not to the level of detail as Frank Herbert (the creator of Dune), at least something a little less lazy that would make these places live in a reader’s imagination with some nuance that shows that these could be real places. Not to say I would never create a monoworld, but if I did, I would be sure to at least explain why the world was like that in the first place.
I used this really cool website called Fractal World Generator to make the map above, then sort of spiffed it up a bit in Photoshop. Nothing crazy, my Photoshop skills are nothing to write home about. It’s a bit crazy to think that a random world generator more or less inspired a lot of the content for the second novel in my new series, but that’s the case.
You set the parameters, and the site lets you play God and spit out entire worlds. This one I set to be 92% ocean coverage, and 33% ice cap coverage. A dozen clicks of the button until I found the map that looked just right. I opened it in Photoshop and started filling in the cities, making up names, imagining how its history might logically unfold, as well as what kind of native life populated it, and how it might interact with Earth life that would inevitably be introduced, and how that native life would respond to that, so on and so on…
Needless to say, it was a lot of fun, and might be my favorite thing to do as a writer. The most fun part about writing Xenoworld, to me, was imaging how a vastly different form of alien life might transform a planet.
Basically, I’m psyched that I discovered this Map Generator. At some point, assuming I have the money for it, I may even hire a professional illustrator to turn these maps into something more pleasing to the eye. In an ideal world (sorry), money wouldn’t be an object, and I’d probably include a ton of maps for the readers’ reference in each of my books.
Why we don’t see this more often with e-books is probably due to the fact that Amazon charges us poor authors delivery fees based on file size. Adding highly detailed maps inside an e-book increases the file size, increasing the delivery fee. A few cents here and there might not seem like a lot, but on the scale of possibly thousands of books sold, it most definitely adds up. I suppose you can charge a dollar more, but then that extra dollar might be enough to persuade many-a-new reader to look elsewhere.
So at best, maps must be limited, and adding something like ten maps to an e-book, as awesome as that might be in theory, is most likely unfeasible.
Long story short, long live maps.
Being self-employed, or working from home, is extremely difficult. Without a plan, it’s incredibly easy to spend the day wandering the Internet or wasting time on whatever vice you’re into.
It’s not so much the work itself that’s hard, but the fact that there’s no big boss setting the agenda. You’re your own boss, and being left to our own devices is an easy path to self-destruction.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in over five years of being self-employed, you are your own worst enemy. Without a clear, concrete plan that takes out all the loopholes of wriggling out of responsibility, you will fall flat on your face and get nothing done, and feel very bad about it. It’s like you’re tripping yourself over and over and saying “Haha!” to yourself like Nelson Muntz, without realizing you’re just bullying yourself. Which of course, just sends you back to your distractions to get rid of the bad feelings.
It’s a vicious cycle, but thankfully, it’s completely avoidable.
That’s my main problem with to-do lists. They promise productivity, but deliver next to nothing. Sure, it’s better than no plan at all, but back when I used to do lists, I left half my tasks undone, and scratched my head as to why.
Then, I discovered schedules. More specifically, how to schedule correctly.
It was a complete game changer. Now, I am here to show you the way into the light.
Back in my days of darkness, I would wake up, look at my computer, blink, and it would be 3:00 already with nothing substantial having been done. I had told myself an insidious lie that there was plenty of time to crank out a couple of thousand words before bed. Those words were always true – until it got to be 9:00 and I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore. On my worst days, I wouldn’t write anything at all.
I knew I was missing something, but just didn’t know what. I tried lists. They would work for a time – but I would end up committing the same sin as before. I’d leave half the tasks unfinished, get discouraged, and decide it wasn’t working.
What I lacked was motivation. Or so I thought.
A typical to do list for me might have looked something like this:
That to me would have been a productive day indeed.
Last year, I wrote a blog post that specifically talked about how amazing to-do lists were. All I can say now is that I’ve learned a thing or two. I’ve found a much better way.
Lists are just part of the answer. They have some inherent flaws that no one really considers:
That third point especially is the biggest strike against to-do lists. Lack of specificity in how and when something is going to happen ultimately leads to it not happening. When tasks aren’t tied to a specific time, in relation to other tasks, our brains just lazily think, “I can do that later.”
That was the missing ingredient. That was why I left so many tasks undone.
The missing element of to-do lists is knowing when, and for how long, tasks will happen.
The cure, I realized, was scheduling . Specifically, learning how to schedule correctly.
The bombshell for me came when I read something that stuck with me, paraphrased thus: Most people use schedules incorrectly. We schedule interruptions instead of scheduling work. It should be the opposite.
When I read that, something just clicked. I had the missing puzzle piece.
I transitioned to Google calendars and scheduled every minute of my work day. I know when I’m waking up. I know when I’m stopping work for the day. I know when I start writing, and when I stop. I know what time lunch is. And all those short tasks that take 15-30 minutes or even less to complete? They’re all grouped together so I can knock them out one after another, without fearing they will interrupt my writing time.
Instead of a vague list, I now have a concrete battle plan, and know exactly, when, and for how long each of my tasks will be.
Instead of robbing me of freedom and creativity, scheduling has given me more freedom than ever. Freedom from guilt from not having done enough, or not using my precious time efficiently. Freedom of scrambling at the beginning of the day wondering what exactly I’m going to do, and no longer being overwhelmed. I feel light as a feather, knowing I’ve spent my time as effectively as I possibly could. Even factoring in short breaks, I’ve been far more productive using this system than when I used a list.
We have way too many things to do in the day, and specific schedules are the missing ingredient to wrangle all those tasks and make them feel manageable, and even easy. Using google calendars, my phone reminds me when a new task is about to start.
Best of all, tasks can be rearranged or edited as needed, and you never lose your sense of time. Sometimes, life happens, but the calendar can be edited to accommodate that. It allows you to adapt and have a new plan of action.
Another advantage of schedules over to-do lists: it makes “batching” easier. If you haven’t heard of batching, it means separating out harder tasks that require a lot of mental energy from smaller tasks that can be done without much thinking.
For me, this means my hard stuff, like editing, I do in the morning first thing. It gets 100% of my attention. All those things I know I have to do later aren’t hanging over my head, because I know they’ll get done at the appointed time.
I know nothing I’m writing here is groundbreaking. I’m sure tons of people already do this, but for me, it’s like a superpower because I’m discovering it for the first time.
By the way – I’m done with the first draft of the second book, and I’ve come up with titles for up to twelve books in this series. I don’t know if it’ll actually be that long, but it would be amazing if it were! I’m now doing a hardcore edit of the first one, mainly to update it and make it consistent with the second, as well as provide more details. After that, it’s on to book 3.
I’ve been thinking about writing a blog post about this for a while, but just now set aside the time get down my thoughts. Maybe some other procrastinator out there will read this and get some use from it. I hope so. Being self-employed is harder than most people give it credit for, but the productivity pitfalls can be avoided with a specific, concrete schedule.
Space Fantasy Series: I’m nearing the end of Book 2. I’m probably a couple of scenes shy before finishing it off and starting edits, before going back to change Book 1 based off things I added in Book 2. By the time Book 2 is done, it should be as much as 100,000 words, which makes it significantly longer than Book 1 as it stands.
Needless to say, because I’ve found this spark, I’m pretty excited about how the rest of this series to come. It should be a grand adventure, and not your typical “good vs. evil” story even if that is the main theme in the end. Or maybe I’m just overselling it.
Either way, I cannot wait until this is done and out, as it’s been too long since I’ve released something.
Another Prequel? The madman! I’ve been toying with a new idea. A novella focusing on Anna’s early life, from her humble origins in Last Town, to her survival in the Wasteland, followed by her becoming Char’s bodyguard in Raider Bluff. If this is done, it will not be as long as Lost Angel – I just don’t think the content is there, and I want to keep the characters fewer – but I think it will make for a nice novella length piece of perhaps 30,000 words. That means it would feel quite short, but hopefully it would be exciting.
Other news: As I’m sure a lot of you know, I live in Florida. Have lived here since June 2017. It’s a bit amazing to me that it’s been three whole years here in the Sunshine State, because it has literally passed in a flash. My wife and I have had lots of adventures in that time – from getting engaged, to getting married, multiple trips to Disney, and now, having a baby boy (still trying to convince the Missus that Alexander Keener West is the most superior name). He’s due in late September.
Life has been pretty busy trying to prepare for him. The main wall of our living room has become a mountain of boxes ordered from Amazon for all the baby stuff. Much to the consternation of our two cats, we went through most of those boxes by now.
The prospect of becoming a father is a bit scary, especially in such uncertain times when the last thing a lot of people want to read is a post-apocalyptic series (I guess the subject hits too close to home). All the same, I’m excited to get a brand new series up and running which should hopefully help with all the diapers and such.
Anyway, I rarely share stuff from my personal life on here, and rarely share on here at all in fact, but it’s something I want to rectify and that only starts by me actually writing something on here (funny how that works). Hopefully the next update does not take as long.
I hardly believe it…
I have the first draft of a novel in a new series DONE!
We’re going into space. Not just space, but space fantasy adventure! If that hasn’t piqued your curiosity, it should!
My plan is to finish the first three, get them edited and good to go, then release each novel a month apart. Then I’ll start working on the fourth and hopefully have it out a month after the third is done.
The good news is I’m writing pretty fast, so all three novels should be finished within the first half of this year. Hopefully sooner.
Want to hear more?
Well, I want a long, epic series. Full of twists and turns, character growth, and world-building so amazing that you will want to live and visit these places.
As currently written, it takes place in the early 23rd century, so as you can imagine there’s a lot of backstory to fill in.
I want to include maps, too, too, but I probably won’t have the budget to get them professionally done. With luck, maybe I will.
Below is a very rough map of one of the planets in the first book, Volsung:
You’ve read this long, so let me give you a bit of a sneak peek of what lies ahead, in a very rough synopsis:
Science gets humanity to space. Magic gets us to the stars.
For eons, the Gates lay abandoned, forgotten, unused…until discovered by humanity. Through their mysterious power, the galaxy was opened for the first time, ushering in an era of exploration and expansion…but at great cost.
Something shifted beneath the fabric of reality. Something dark. People began being born with magical abilities…abilities that guaranteed an eventual descent into madness…
The Mages tore the Galaxy asunder. Worlds fell, fleets were obliterated, billions died. The Mages were defeated, but they left the Hundred Worlds in flames.
Mages are now strictly controlled. Magical aptitude is tested for annually, and those with an affinity must bear the Mark of the Magus on their foreheads.
One day, twenty-year-old Saren Abrantes goes to the Health Authority for testing.
When he walks out bearing the Mark, his life will never be the same.
I’m 75,320 words into my new novel. At times it feels really hard to write. There’s always that point in the middle where you start wondering why you’re even doing it, or doubt creeps in and you just know no one’s going to read it. Or worse, they will read it using your past works as a standard and realize this one just isn’t up to snuff. All of those things might very well be true for all I know, even Stephen King has his stinkers (no offense Steve though I doubt you’re reading this).
The basic premise is, it’s set in space. It has a bit of magic in it, though it’s not called magic. Basically, there’s a reality behind reality that’s running the show, and certain people have the ability to control that reality, only doing so comes at the price of the user eventually going mad. Turns out using this power, called the Manifold, is highly dangerous and corrupts those who use it in an unsafe manner.
In fact, there might not be any safe way to use it. No one understands how it works, but people are what are called Psionics can use it, and are separated from the rest of society. Because of the whole going mad thing. It even led to a war, but that happens before the events of the book.
It’s set in a future. The date I’m going with is 2314. An interstellar gateway, built by an ancient race long dead, is discovered at the edge of our solar system. It still works. This is about, oh, maybe late 21st century when this is discovered, in a time where humanity is just starting to colonize the solar system. Well, the discovery leads to huge leaps in advanced spaceflight and by the time 2314 rolls around, the early 24th century, humanity has discovered hundreds of these gates, allowing them bridge the gap between the stars. Some of the gates lead to habitable planets, and others not so habitable, but still colonizable.
Space flight is still slow. It still takes anywhere from days to weeks to cross a particular solar system from one gate to another, depending on the system’s size. That’s because there’s no faster than light travel, since a single gate just exists in two points of space at the same time. Passing through it just leads you out the other side, light years away. It sort of creates a situation where it was like the 18th century, where a ship might leave London and still take weeks to get to India. It’s like that but on a much grander scaled, where the furthest worlds might take months or even years to reach.
Basically, by the time the story picks up, there are a hundred worlds that are officially colonized and incorporated into this very loose empire of planets that sometimes war with each other.
That’s just the background, the story begins by following a young man who begins to develop psionic abilities, mostly being able to dream and foresee future events.
It has a little of everything so far, mystery, action, philosophical introspection, even a bit of romance. It still sucks a lot, goes a little slow at points, but at least the concept is solid and I think it has a lot of potential. I’ve created some covers for six books in the series so far. Don’t know if I’ll ever use them, but they’re there on my desktop to inspire me. Don’t want to give them away yet since it’s subject to change.
Anyway, I’m hard at work here. I hate that I’m so long-winded. This books is almost as long as all my other ones and, but it hasn’t really developed a plot that’s satisfying to me. I’m not sure why that is, because usually I have an intrinsic feel for these things, so I just hope it’s not too boring for a first book. It’s really important for the first book in a series to be really good in order to get people to keep reading and for me to collect a check big enough to pay the rent. It’s either that or the book will have to be longer than I want it to be.
I’m sure if I keep working at it, then the solution will come.
This has nothing to do what I wrote about, but if you guys liked Aberration, The Xenoworld Saga as a whole, or Lost Angel, consider leaving a review on Amazon or wherever you bought the book. It helps a lot as an author because a good review can really influence someone’s decision to give an author they’ve never heard of a chance. I’m pretty grateful for all my readers, because without you guys taking a chance on my stuff, I wouldn’t be where I am today.
Thanks, let me know what you think of the idea in the comments. I hope you guys like space operas with fantastical elements in them.
At long last, Lost Angel: A Wasteland Chronicles Prequel has dropped practically everywhere e-books are sold.
Pick it up here.
On a personal note, it was fun to return to the Wasteland. It’s a bit crazy I wrote my first book for it in December 2012 and here I am, a little over seven years later, still writing stuff for the series.
I had fun stepping out of first person perspective for the first time in a published novel, and I ended up writing and publishing the book in probably two months. Not a record, but definitely the fastest I’ve written in quite a while.
Is it possible we see backstories for more Wasteland characters? Maybe. Kind of depends on how the masses react to this one, as the writing style is a bit different.
For now, the best career move is probably to move into something completely new. If you liked Wasteland and Xenoworld, then you’ll probably like this, too, even if there’s going to be bit of a genre shift from Earth and into space.
I’ll tease more a bit later, but for now, let’s let Makara have the spotlight.
Find it on Amazon, B&N, Apple Store, Kobo.
It will be available on Google Play the day of, and pre-order should go live sooner.
The release date is 1/21 – This Tuesday!
