I hope everyone has a fantastic Christmas. I feel like we haven’t stopped moving this entire holiday season, from Thanksgiving until now, but I expect (or maybe just hope) that things will be very different after this week. I’ll be out of classes until the second week in January or so and it will just be regular ‘ol working for me. That’ll be a nice change. It will also mean two solid weeks of some hardcore writing. Huzzah! I expect I’ll be able to finish The Forest Awakens during those two weeks. And also get a few new podcast episodes written. *fingers crossed*

Christmas has be FUN so far too though. We had my wife’s grandmother for our traditional pre-Christmas chicken enchiladas last night. Yum yum! We opened our presents and got to talk. I think it says a lot about me that my wife bought me a medieval lego set, I got her the new Donkey Kong Country Wii game. Hehe. Today we’re off to the family ranch to spend the remainder of the time with most of my family. That means there will be a whole lot of kids there. There is nothing like doing Christmas morning with a whole lot of little children.

I hope you guys all have a good Xmas too. Feel free to let me know what you’ll be up to! I always like a good Xmas story. And for fun, this is a trailer for the game. Cause it looks awesome and we can’t wait to play it!

The Lands of Draknor is something that has been rolling around in my head for a very long time. I still remember the very first short story I wrote in that world. Ashthranh, mercenary for the Gods, and a murderous task. It was a very simplistic tale back then, written by a 16-year-old Sophomore in high school, but it started something much bigger. Over time that simple plot changed a great deal, but the main protagonist, Ashthran the Dryth, never did. Working on these podcasts, many of them being set at various periods in time in the world of Draknor, has really made me want to get back into the creation of this world. And so I think I will. I am getting close to finishing the final draft of The Forest Awakens, so I believe my assassin novel will have to be put off yet again to make way for something much more significant to me.

Check back next Tuesday for the full audio of Marked By The Dragon!

Something I’ve wanted to do more lately is work on a little artwork to go along with each of my stories. I don’t know how successful this will be, I’m not a very good artist. But I have a lot of fun drawing. And I figure, like writing, practice can only make me better. I wanted Nyxor to be a little bigger I think, but I like how this came out.

This a one of the Draknor shields that might be found where Marked By The Dragon takes place, in the holy city of Alindrak. The symbol is of a dragon, Nyxor, eating her own tail. Based upon the oldest known symbol, the Uroborus. It’s one of my favorite symbols.

I’m looking forward to going back a bit and trying my hand at some artwork for older stories as well. Hopefully it all ends well. If nothing else, at least I’ll get to have some fun with it.

I hope everyone had a good holiday this year. Thanksgiving is always a fun one. It’s just about getting to spend some time with family and having fun. Or at least it always has been. This year we decided the best thing to do would be to host it ourselves.

That sounds like a good idea, ya? Have a few people over, close family, maybe a couple friends. Ya right. Word spreads, and soon there is over a dozen people planning on attending. This is when freak-out mode began for poor Robert. Samantha found this hilarious blog a couple weeks ago and in one of her posts she had such a great quote. It became our slogan for the holidays. “Clean ALL the things!” We were saying it all the time. Hehe.

In the end it all couldn’t have gone better. I think we had about a dozen that stayed for lunch, and about 17 or 18 that showed up after lunch to talk and hang out for a bit. The food was all ready on time, the people got along great, I couldn’t have asked for a better holiday.

Maybe there is something to this pre-holiday freak out time. If we hadn’t done that, and gotten it out of our system, then I don’t think things would have turned out nearly so well. So take that as your holiday-hosting lesson for the year. Hope everyone else had a good Thanksgiving!

So, this is another attempt at publishing a new podcast! Tuesday had…some technical issues. Which, in other words, means I couldn’t even get on my own website. Tsk tsk. But the hosting company got it working late Tuesday night they said. I just had too much to do to get on yesterday. So it’s Thursday Night Stories this week! Yay!

Story 8 is actually a 1st draft of one chapter in my adult fantasy work in progress, The Lands of Draknor, and one of my favorite pieces. I’m calling this story Marked By The Dragon. This story tells of young Renier Matrala, Prince of Palsarrien. He has come to the Draknor kingdom to train and become a member of the Draknor Society. This is about his initiation ritual.

As always, thanks for joining us tonight. Sorry again about the delays. If you’d rather read it, it’ll be up on the podcast page and Goodreads soon.

Hello everyone, Halloween is upon us! Things hiding in the dark and all that. This year is kind of a bummer for me on my near-favorite holiday. *sighs* I’m sick, again. This year has been filled with sickness, I hates it, precious! On top of that, I get to work tonight, yay… I don’t ever get scheduled to work Sundays so I was a bit bummed about it. Samantha gets to go trick-or-treating with my sister and her kiddos. I would much prefer to do that. Oh well…

I’ve been productive lately, in a not-so-bloggy kind of way. I’m sure you guys are used to my quietness by now so I’ll stop apologizing for it. Muahah. But I’ve been reading and writing a lot. The Forest Awakens has an entirely new prologue and a new chapter one has been fully fleshed out as well (the writing has just begun). You may be thinking… your percent bar doesn’t really reflect still working on the first chapter, but, alas, it does. These are the two main goals for this draft. I’ve touched up chapters here and there in no particular order, but this is the meat of what I hope is the final, final draft that brings me an agent.

Pushed to the Edge is coming to a close soon. I’ve been too sick to write this week so it’s going to get delayed a week. I tried (and actually completed) a draft of it. But I hit the magic button and it got DELETED. Trust me, it was for the best. I have about 1000 words of a newer, much better version.

To finish, here are some books I’ve read lately. We’re hyped up for Towers of Midnight coming out Tuesday!

• His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman
• The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell
• The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

For a number of reasons, some that I’ll mention in a moment, David and I have decided to change the format of our podcast. Instead of bringing new episodes every week we’re going to do it every other Tuesday and make each episode last a bit longer. It may not be a permanent change, but for now it’s how we’ll run things. Because of this I’m going to attempt to do more posts than just the Tuesday Night Stories. I figure one post every two weeks might be a bit too rare.

To keep up Tuesday posts, I’m going to talk a little bit about where the story is at on the days that we don’t have a podcast episode. It will be a way to get into my mind as I’m plotting and writing these. Hopefully a little insight into my process will be entertaining. It’s possible that I might have something else to share about the stories on the off weeks, but it’s too soon to talk about it just yet! For now it’s my super-secret TNS plan. *gives a drastic villain cackle*

So, some reasons why we’re moving the podcast to every other Tuesday:

• Time has become a serious factor for me lately. The point of this isn’t to let my writing suffer by pushing too hard. Longer episodes, a bit more spread out, will let me dedicate the time needed for each one.
• Some of the stories are 7-9 episodes each. Without any breaks that is more than two months per story. That seems like a long time to keep people’s attention. Longer episodes should mean that each story can be released faster.
• Since I started this my writing time for non-podcast projects has been a lot more limited than I originally planned. Having more time for each one will let me get back to work on my novels. That’s really important to me.
• Last but not least, I think each episode will contain a lot better writing by not having to rush (sometimes I’ve have to rush it a lot more than I want). This goes for David as well, giving him plenty of time to get a perfect recording.

I appreciate your understanding in this matter. I hope that it will only increase the quality of our podcast. Sometimes writing just needs a little more time to marinate!

It’s been a sickly week around the Leonard household. I was taking a lot of cold medication this last week so I apologize about the missing podcast Tuesday. The story is written and has already been sent off to David so no worries about it this coming week. I’m finally feeling a bit better, but Samantha is sick now! This is why I don’t go to Chuck E. Cheese! It’s one of those places for kid parties. Pizza, video games, etc. Everything is sticky. Everything is just waiting to get you sick. *shudders*

Anyway, thanks for your patience.