What does political intrigue, brutal murder, and a bully all have in common? As you might expect, they all play heavily in The Emperor’s Blades. Aside from that, they’re all elements of fiction that I generally dislike. And yet I liked The Emperor’s Blades. Not despite these elements, but rather, for the most part, because of them.
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Despite being a relatively new book, I might be one of the last fantasy nerds to read The Name of the Wind. I’ve heard plenty of hype, but also enough grousing that I went into the book with roughly no expectations.
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When I first graduated from college, I wanted a huge desk. More like a table, really; I didn’t need drawers or anything like that, just a long, but narrow, workspace. I priced them, even at IKEA, and walked away shaking my head. Way too rich for my blood.
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A little over four months ago I started developer boot camp at Academy Pittsburgh. Dave took my first day of school photo and I hopped in the car and drove to Allentown an hour earlier than necessary, a list of worries as long as my arm swirling in my head. What if the cost—free—belied that there was something wrong with the program? What if I didn’t like my classmates, or worse, what if they didn’t like me? What if my tangential history with programming wasn’t enough, and the course sped along, leaving me in the dust? What if the course ended up being a three-month waste of time, and I left without the ability to get a job?
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July was swelteringly hot and chaotic, and not at all what we originally expected. We had to do a serious pivot in order to re-focus on what was most important. Two milestones we set at the beginning of the year also came into question.
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It was hard to believe we had another week in Kyoto, but there was still a lot to do. In this article, I cover a monthly handcraft market held on temple grounds, shrines nestled in the bamboo grove of Arashiyama, boats and rickshaws along the Hozu-gawa River, and a mountain park crawling with monkeys.
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Last week, I wrote about five of my favorite #PitMad pitches. In this article, I give a little more info on what PitMad is and list five more equally great pitches that employ different techniques.
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Usually, after I wake up, I feed the doggies, let them out, pat them on the head, and get straight to freelance work. After just telling Leslie last week about how we need to get back to querying, I thought the #PitMad competition would be a good warm-up. I like the competition approach, because I prefer to submit to agents that have shown an iota of interest in our work more than cold querying.
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You might think people are more likely to give positive reviews to a free book, but I don’t think that’s true. In fact, it can be hard to get any reviews, at all. After a few months of publication and thousands of downloads, less than ten people reviewed Steampunk Fairy Tales on Amazon.
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May turned out exactly as we expected: I focused on freelance work, Leslie studied hard, we made some progress in Bitlather Chronicles #2, and we planned our next story for Steampunk Fairy Tales.
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