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.

Story #7 has officially come to and end. I liked this one, it was a cool challenge. I had fun getting out of my usual comfort zone. Sure I write fantasy, but traditionally fantasy is based on English/European history. A lot of mine also draws from American history as well. But I’ll do a post this week that is more about all that, and I’ll talk more about the ideas and concepts behind the story as well.

If you’re joining us for the first time tonight, this is a complete fantasy story that was told in eight parts. For fifteen years invaders from the distant land of Kallis have held Alsalam in servitude to their army, but they’ve brought peace and prosperity as well. When a murderous and enslaving change in command comes down from the eastern King, Alsalam must use the military knowledge he’s learned from them not only to defend himself, but all the tribes of his homeland.

Remember, a brand new story starts in two weeks. If you’d rather read Pushed To The Edge, or you’d like to download the MP3, you can do so here. As always, thanks for joining us! Feel free to let me know below what you think of the story.

Tonight we conclude Pushed to the Edge. This has been a fun story to write and record both. The accents were a lot of fun to play around with for the Affraki people, and the Kallish as well. This story ended up longer than any previous we’d done at 13,500 words. Making a total of 62,000 words for the podcast. I’m quite impressed! That’s about the size of a book, if only a young adult/teen book (adult books are generally at least a little longer).

In this final part, Alsalam marches on the city Mallic Pince is guarding, the last stronghold of the Kallish army. Pince has more troops than Brannis held, and a solid defensive structure. In many ways the Kallish army is more advanced and generally better trained for war. It seems apparent that Alsalam must use his wits, and Brannis’ knowledge of his people’s war tactice, to come out of this fight ahead.

A new story will begin in two weeks! As always, thanks for joining us. If you’ve missed parts or would rather read the story, check here, it’ll be up 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

I’ve managed to slink my way up to publish the podcast. I think I managed to mess my back up at work yesterday. Sometimes we have to move heavy shelves and such around the book store and yesterday was the worst I’ve seen. It was a very painful, restless night. I tried to participate in the real world today, but I only made until about 1pm.

Tonight is part 7 of Pushed to the Edge. As most of you probably guessed, it’s time to learn a bit more about the Karassi tribe and what their arrival means for Alsalam and his plans. Alsalam is surprised how things have gone a bit like they expected it to. Will Alsalam march to war or will he have to find another approach to his plans?

As always, I hope you enjoy the story! If you’ve missed parts or you would rather read the story, you can find it here.

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!

Welcome back, everyone! Sorry again about the absence last week. Rest assured we’re healthy again (or close enough anyway). This week’s episode is one of those gems that David and I both really enjoyed. I think the writing is some of my best work, and his reading of it is dead on.

Part 6 of Pushed to the Edge takes a look at Brannis watching different interactions between Alsalam and his people. It’s the first time we’ve gone into the Kallish man’s head and I like it a lot. Brannis is a fascinating character with a lot of depth. He’s the kind of character I could see getting his own story some time down the line. There is a lot of history there.

As always, I hope you enjoy! And if you’d rather read the story, or you’ve missed previous parts, you can click here.