dystopian

Done!

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Last night I finally wrapped up Turning, the first installment of my teen dystopian New World Order series. I hope you’ll take a chance and read the book. You can find the main page here, and if you open all subsequent pages in a new window, you’ll be able to return to it to find the next chapters rather easily.

I’ll be releasing the book on Amazon and Createspace soon, and I hope that I can count on you to leave me honest reviews when I do.

The book will continue to be available for free here on the website through at least the month of May while I await your reactions, though you’ll be able to buy it for download on your Kindle or a paperback copy as soon as I have it up.

If I receive comments before releasing the book, I’ll be happy to include those in the front matter (hey! You’ll get your name in print!). If you’d rather I didn’t, just let me know and I’ll keep them out of the final copy.

Thanks for everyone for your patience as I composed this project. I know it took me a lot longer than I initially wanted it to, but writing is like that. Churning out a book in less than a year is very difficult, if only because sometimes it takes that long for the story and characters to mature. The process is very organic, and some things just cannot be rushed without getting poor results.

As soon as I’m able, I’ll get back to work on the other five projects (might be later today, though I might just take a break, too). I did crank out 6,383 words yesterday to pull this off. Getting to the finish line of a book is often like the final sprint in a marathon. Once you cross the line, you really don’t want to keep running, you know?

At any rate, there it is. Ten novels are now completed, and I hope to have two or three more done by the end of the year.

In The Widening Gyre

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I mentioned earlier that my daughter is all over The Hunger Games, and that I’ve been considering about writing my own dystopian teen thriller to sorta capture the sense of what these books were all about. I’ve finished reading The Hunger Games series as of yesterday, and I was quite impressed with the story. Suzanne Collins did a smash-up job putting this world together. Honestly, the only thing that hung up for me was the utter hopelessness with which the book ended. Okay, that might be too strong a word, there was a little hope, but so very, very little. Then again, what else should we expect from dystopian fiction?

Regardless, I’ve been thinking a lot about both the books and my own foray into this genre (and yes, I promise I will complete the other books as soon as I’m done), and I’ve decided to try something a little different for this one.

I’m going to give it to you, chapter by chapter, here on this blog. At the end, naturally, I will send the book out to both print and e-publishing (because who wants to spend all that time reading a blog!), but in the meantime, I thought I’d invite you to join with me (and my children, who are my Beta Readers for this) in experiencing the book as it unfolds.

With that in mind, I’m also soliciting your comments, thoughts, and suggestions both on the writing and on the story as it unfolds. You, dear readers, will serve as my editors and sounding board. You’ll also hold me accountable to finish it quickly, I suspect.

I will post the first chapter tomorrow, and then all subsequent chapters as I complete them. There may be a slight lag at the beginning as I have a little catch-up work to do. Expect about a chapter a day, with time off for weekends, probably, and I’ll do my best to hold to that schedule.

I hope you like the story!

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