Spring.

Longer days, shorter nights, and if you’re in Japan, roof top beer gardens are waiting just at the turn of the summer.

Here though, I’ve been away from the keyboard. Not intentionally. Had a few personal family problems in April that derailed production for the entire month, but all has been resolved on a positive note. During that month, however, nothing got done. The creative juices went dry. And when I actually did get a chance to sit down in front of the PC, my mind was a blank. Nothing flowed. I’m glad April is done and gone.

May is here, and I hope to get back into the saddle this week.

Before April, I had produced about 30K of book three of the 131 Days series. I also started a new werewolf horror book and got about 10K into that, working on it in the evening. It wasn’t as bad I thought it would be, switching gears from one genre to the other, and though I would only write about a thousand words when I had the chance, it was shaping up nicely. I’ll resume both of these this week and try to make up for lost time.

Some folks have written and asked about a MM4, and I flip flop on the question, which tells me I’m still not ready to do another zombie book… but I am making notes.

Book two (entitled “Ten”) of the 131 Days series has finished editing and heads into the proofreading stage. Kelly, my editor, enjoyed the read (he was probably being very nice) so I hope to have that on sale by maybe mid to end of June. It’ll be a quiet release, with very little fanfare, and probably priced at $4.99. Why the jump? Taxes, my friend, taxes.  Up here in Canada, I’m hit with an irritable little 13% pick-hammer called the GST, which bites into my profits after the fact that Amazon will discount my prices at will. I have no control over either, except raising my prices to counter the taxes and discounts. I’m hoping that this will be the limit to any price increases going forward, as each new book finds new readers and increases my audience. If it gets bigger, no need to raise prices ever again. And $4.99 was the price I eventually wanted to be at, anyway.

How long will this fantasy series be? I have no idea. It’ll be as long as needed, I guess. Until the story is done.

I also have He-Dog 2 (“Savage”) in the wings. I was converting an older book into a new one, and the process hit a few snags which led me to dropping the book for a bit. I’m going to try and get back on this one once I’ve finished one of the current projects. Already have the cover here (done by Chris Rallis) and so it makes sense to get on this one soon–probably even before the werewolf book gets finished. I want to get a few more fantasy books out there as, in the long run, I have more fantasy stories to tell than horror.

So that’s it. You’re caught up.

I hope your May is a good one…