Dragons of the Ashfall: FREE Prequel and Chapter One

December 1, 2021, you can order Dragons of the Ashfall for digital or paperback from Amazon. Before then, you can read the prequel “A Dragon Bigger than My Stories” for free here.

And to see if Dragons of the Ashfall is your type of story… read the first chapter for free, right here:

Chapter One

The night of the riots is kind of a blur. The push of hands and elbows and coats. The clicking of the gears. The falling ash and cold pavement stones beneath my feet. All of it mashed together, constantly moving, more like just little paintings of memories than actual solid knowledge. It’s all like that except for two things:

That night was the first time I saw the Well-Dressed Man.

And it was the last time I cried.

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You’re Not Allowed to Celebrate

Depression doesn’t care that you have a new book coming out. It doesn’t care about the now-long list of publications you have or the plans you’ve got for 2022. It laughs when you say it’s time to get to work. Depression has its own goals.

I’ve written before how depression doesn’t create art. And it doesn’t. It squelches the creative process. Yes, some people can channel that into amazing art, but imagine what would happen if they weren’t hampered, if they didn’t have to battle just to get out of bed. I still stand by my statement. Depression doesn’t create art.

But it also keeps you from celebrating the art you’ve created. I have another novel coming out in less than two weeks! It’s book one in a four-book series! I should be excited! Ecstatic! Advertising how awesome it is!

I think I’ll just sit here and cry. Or maybe not. After all, I want to cry, but I think I’ve forgotten how. Let’s hear it for depression!

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How to Confuse a Writer

If you want to derail a writer, ask them what their book is about.

“Well, you see, it’s about, um, there’s a girl, and she does some things, but it’s really awesome, well I think it is anyway, and I want to tell it to you, but I don’t want to give anything away, but there are dragons and people and there’s conflict and you’ll laugh and then there’s this big bad guy but I can’t tell you about him because that might give something away…”

And that’s, of course, after the writer gets their gears turning again. Because the first thing the writer thinks when someone asks, “What’s your book about?” is utter and complete gear lock-up.

Trust me on this. If you want to see me speechless, just ask what any of my books are about.

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How You Say What You Say

Dialogue doesn’t just reveal a character; it reveals their world.

Dragons of the Ashfall takes place in a steampunk world of gears and coal. I wanted the vocabulary the characters used to reflect the setting, so I invented a number of idioms. “I’ll be out in a gear’s turn,” means the person will be out of the bathroom quickly, for instance. In context, you can figure that out, but the words themselves also reveal the world they live in.

Now, I could come up with a number of turns of phrase that fit that setting, but they all hinged on coal and gears when I tried. What that meant was I started getting relatively repetitive, and no one wants that. So what’s a writer to do?

Were you aware that most writers need to do research, even when they’re creating fictional worlds?

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