It’s #NaNoWriMo Season!

If you’re unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo, it’s an annual writing activity pursued by hundreds of thousands of lunatics with the goal of producing 50,000 words of a single story in one month. I don’t find that particularly challenging, but I love the atmosphere, camaraderie, and peer pressure inherent in the month-long obsession with writing.

This year, I’ve set aside the month of November to write two specific books: Backyard Dragons and Chowndie.

Backyard Dragons is the sequel to Girls Can’t Be Knights. It’s going to focus on Claire with Justin as a secondary character this time, explain a little more about the setting, continue the awkwardness between her and Drew, and–as the title suggests–bring dragons into the mix. This is a Spirit Knights book, so there will also be a spirit causing trouble.

Chowndie is a book I’ve already written. Badly. It began life as a story I wrote to show my mom that I could do that deep, profound literature crap she likes. Since I’m clearly not into that, it turned into a fish gasping for its last breath on a quay surrounded by pigeons (it flopped). Armed with a new plot angle, 50% more guns and car chases, and 100% less piano, Chowndie is set to become a nanopunk thriller. Action, suspense, and bad guys take me back to the style of Dragons In Pieces, which is my writing home base.

Right now, I’m working on short story submissions. One will appear in next year’s GenCon Authors’ Missing Pieces anthology and reveals the earlier adventures of Tahjis the Rat, the secondary character in my new book, Al-Kabar. If you haven’t heard yet, that book is now available for pre-order on Amazon, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble. It releases on the 18th, and to celebrate its arrival, I’m offering the ebook for only 99 cents until the 26th. This book will likely never be that cheap again, so grab it while the grabbing is good. It’s a standalone story set in the same world as Damsel In Distress, and you don’t need to have read that book to get into this one. If you’d rather have the paperback and live in the Pacific Northwest, I’ll have copies with me at the WordFire Press booth and Ripley’s Book Booth at Rose City Comic Con, at Jeffrey Cook’s table at Steamposium, in the Book Garden at the Portland Home & Garden Show, at the AFK Elixirs & Eatery in Renton on 10/10, and at more events to be announced later. otherwise, any of the links above will take care of you.

Happy reading!

P.S. Book 4 of The Greatest Sin will be out next year, we just don’t know when yet. Hopefully, so will Book 5.