Happy Birthday to my Wife

Happy Birthday to my wife from Red and the gang

I pulled characters from other drawings to create this little celebratory image. If you zoom in, you'll see I snuck a birthday cake in there... all me, so be thankful I commission other folks for the artwork in my books. 😄

Outside of the birthday events (still ongoing... she has a mechanical bull ride adventure with her girlfriends tonight... 😨 ... I'll know the results of that before I send this newsletter, so I might have to tweak this later [update - no hospital trips were involved]), my oldest daughter was allowed back into basketball (after some pretty ridiculous COVID return policies at her school), and my day-job work continued to be an absolute beast. I think I've got six months of a tremendous amount of pressure at work, and I make it worse by thinking about how it will continue for six months!

“We're so busy watching out for what's just ahead of us that we don't take time to enjoy where we are.”
― Bill Watterson

Welcome, Gary, Robert, & Stephanie! Every new subscriber makes me consider whether I’m putting information of value in these newsletters, which is a good thing. I welcome feedback. I usually have a little personal update and then writing updates.

Writing Updates

I received an interesting ad for a service called ScoreIt from inkubate.com--they compare your book(s) to a list of best-selling books and tell you which books are most similar to yours in terms of certain characteristics. I thought there might be things I would learn from that which would help with marketing. I chose Book 1 & Book 3 from The Guardian League, as I thought my style had improved between the books, and I wondered how that might change the results.

I know... in this newsletter and the last one, I'm redirecting you to other books, adding to your TBR. I apologize for the guilt-ridden TBR stack, but I find the comparisons interesting, and learning about what to do with the information both fascinating and frustrating, so I drag you along for the ride. ScoreIt compares your writing against other books in terms of these categories:

Authorial Vocabulary
Expressive Complexity
Grammar
Tonal Quality

These are the top matches for Book 1:

These were tops for Book 3, and I did gear up an Amazon ad to target readers of Jim Butcher after seeing this. The service only provided insightful keywords for the top match--I will have to figure out how to get similar info for Dean Koontz on my own.

I’ve read one of the Dresden Files books, though it was an eternity past, and I wouldn’t have guessed our writing was as stylistically similar as this report suggests. I’ve read other books by Koontz, but not this one. 🤷‍♂️ Anyone else see the similarities?

Okay, after all those fun graphics (and links to the books if you click on them), my main writing update is that I'm on chapter 74 of 101 in terms of structural edits for Book 4. I'm still not happy with how some events don't sneak up the way I intended, so after I finish this round, I'm going to make another attempt at revising some targeted areas.

I've started dialoging with my favorite artist for pictures to go into Book 4, but paused while they work on character reveal art for Bear and Rocks. Writing up the artwork descriptions always takes some time, so I'll need to carve that out.

Oh, one other thing. I know none of you have read Book 4, but I've got some title ideas. Well, I suppose my mother and my editor have read early copies of book 4. Regardless, here's what I've got rolling around in my noggin.

The Song Unsung
The Unsung Song
Blinding Sauron's Eye
Sauron's Other Eye
Sauron's Blind Eye

The connection to Sauron's Eye is tenuous, but like "We're Going on an Elf Hunt", I enjoy the reference to other books. The Song references make a lot more sense, contextually, though I can't explain why without revealing too much. And I do enjoy the Aha moment of when a title connects to a book. Any input from a reader's perspective on title alone? My ideas for the cover are too complicated at present--I'm not sure they could be created.

o To-Do list for writing last week: