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Half-Over Summer

All right, all right, I can’t use the holiday excuse anymore to avoid working on this newsletter. What is it they say? It takes twenty-eight days to develop a habit? How long does it take if that habitual action is only habituated once a month? I don’t even know if that’s a word, but that never stopped Dr. Seuss.

 

Old Business

Feels a little odd to call this old news, but it also kind of is. Turning Point (The Chivalrous Welshman #9) has been released! Huzzah! It is the longest in the series by page count at a whopping 918. While it is one of the longest by word count, it is not the actual longest. The reason for the disparity is because there is a lot of back-and-forth dialogue. A lot of back-and-forth. And that eats up lines very quickly. There is one chapter that is...forty pages long? Longer? Maybe closer to fifty? The last time a chapter was that long was in Windup (The Chivalrous Welshman #3) when Walter was explaining his story. Generally speaking, across the series, most chapters are in the neighborhood of twenty pages.

 

But it really is strange to think that The Chivalrous Welshman is almost complete. Only one more book. Comparatively speaking, it is on the shorter side at roughly 264k words. It’s exciting and terrifying. More than just finishing a book, this is finishing a series, the one that started it all.

 

I was so excited for Turning Point, I actually thought about going ahead and releasing The Eleventh Hour (The Chivalrous Welshman #10/F) in December and pushing Bearer of Bad News (The Akari-Bearer #1) to next December. That way, TCW would be done and finished and we could all move on. Then I considered that such a move would mean that I would have to fresh-write The Akari-Bearer and The Fifth Horseman at the same time in the same year. I knew instantly that I would not have the wiggle-room I wanted, so that idea was scrapped. Bearer of Bad News will come out this December and The Eleventh Hour will come out next summer as planned.

 

I mean, I will still be fresh-writing both series eventually, but I’ll just have better momentum in each if I keep things the way they are.

 

New Business

On the coattails of Turning Point being released, some of its deleted chapters/scenes will also be made available on The Timekeeper Chronicles website. Some of them will be so weird, you’ll wonder where in the world I was going with this. And sometimes, I really don’t know. Turning Point (and The Eleventh Hour) are the two most-heavily altered books of the series, this owing to the completion of The Hands of Time. So I’ll hope you enjoy them, get a good chuckle out of some of them.

 

I can’t say that I have a lot of new business in the writing realm. I was a little caught up with The Eleventh Hour for a bit after Turning Point’s release. Needed to straighten some things around and whatnot. But now I’m pretty well back to working on Bearer of Bad News.

 

Fun Factoid

Most non-standard names are simply placeholders that never got changed. I never actually intended for the Akari to be called the Akari. I wanted something way cooler, but I also wanted to avoid “giving it an English word with a capital letter” syndrome. The Sight. The Gift. The Talent. The This. The That. I wanted it to be short and sweet, but interesting, fun to say. Unfortunately, when the name of the thing first came up in Time to Kill, I just couldn’t come up with anything cool. I thought maybe I would find some inspiration as the story panned out, except every single time it came up, I had to use the Akari placeholder. Finally, when I had four books written, I knew I couldn’t go back (actually I just didn’t want to) and change every single instance, so I decided to just keep it, come what may.

 

Truth be told, I hate the name Akari. I don’t like its shape, its sound, anything about it as a word. And, outing myself here a little, I ripped it from the ka’kari, from Brent Weeks’ Night Angel books. It is one of my favorite series and it was the only thing I could think of at the time as a placeholder that wasn’t “giving it an English word with a capital letter” syndrome.

 

So there. A quick story about laziness.

 

Other News

Plenty of news in this realm.

 

I would like to start off by saying that I think college is a crock. It’s an expensive lie. Anymore, there are very few things that college can teach that the internet can’t. In fact, if it is based on computers at all, probably not going to learn anything at college. You can either find it for free online or else you’ll get specific on-the-job training. Not everything is like this, but the vast majority of majors have been rendered obsolete by the internet.

 

That being said, I am going back to school via Michigan’s Reconnect program. Basically, if you’re a Michigan resident, over 21, and don’t have a degree, your tuition will be covered (insert fine print here). I looked into it since we live in-district of a small community college and I decided to enroll in their welding program.

 

Could I learn this from the internet or on-the-job? Yes, to an extent. Except I don’t know/live within reasonable distance of someone who is a welder and 1. wants to teach someone, 2. knows how to teach (not everyone is a good teacher), 3. has the time to teach, 4. has equipment in decent working order, 5. has doodling materials, 6. is patient enough to let me doodle and make mistakes.

 

Don’t get me wrong. I in no way believe that this degree is going to land me a cushy 7-figure job where I can (whatever idiots think their degree in indigenous transxenomorphic fashion of the thirteenth century will get them). But I do want to learn how to weld. And just like I can build you a barn, remodel any room in your house (especially your bathroom), or do whatever you need, I’d like to be able to offer welding as just another service I can provide.