THE NEW BREED CHRONICLES - THE COMPLETE FIRST NOVEL

So, it's done.  It took way, way, way too long.  THE NEW BREED CHRONICLES - THE COMPLETE FIRST NOVEL is finally finished.  As promised, I've been working hard on it.

Time has gotten much better for me and should continue to be that way.  We've finished (well, mostly) with building our house and moving into it.  With that monster task behind me, I can now dedicate more time to my other monster tasks - har, har!

Seriously, I know the series has taken a long time to reach this point.  I'd like to thank all of the readers that have patiently stuck with this mess as episodes leaked out every few months.  I am already working on the second installment of THE NEW BREED CHRONICLES.  I won't be releasing this in episodes.  I'm hoping that it should see the light of day in a short few months.

Editing Software

Readers have, very helpfully, let me know that the editing of my books could be a lot better.  This information has come, almost exclusively, in the form of reviews.
The reason my editing may be poor is probably because of two things:

    1) I can't afford professional editing.  If you guys, the faithful readers, keep on reading, and rating, and telling other people about my books, then maybe I will be able to pay a pro to sort out my mess someday soon.
    2) I 100% suck at editing.  I can read a disastrous error in my own work ten times and still miss it.  A teacher of mine explained this once.  He said mistakes you make when blasting out words are natural to your mind.  This means, that when reading over those errors, they make sense to your brain and you fail to be able to detect them.  Maybe it's just a nice excuse!

Regardless, I've been working as hard as I can at trying to fix those messes.  I've gone over BREED, DEEP, and all of THE NEW BREED CHRONICLES with my eyes (as in, reading them), and using several pieces of proof-reading and editing software.  I know the result is probably still not perfect, but I definitely hope the result is a better experience for readers.

New Breed Chronicles and Coming Months

I've probably said it before but the New Breed Chronicles experiment has been a failure.

I started writing the Chronicles in an episodic format because I thought it might be an interesting way to produce a new story and I felt that with the new rules of digital media, it might be a way to increase my shelf-space on  Amazon, while maybe drawing new readers in.

It has, to be fair, not been an utter failure.  There have been new readers and there have been sales.  The failure has been mine.  The episodes were supposed to be monthly releases.  I think, if I went to the bother of adding it all up, that they have barely been six-monthly.  No reader is going to hang around to pick up ten thousand odd words twice a year.

So, I am not giving up on the Chronicles.  I actually really enjoy writing them.  But the episodic nature is more or less dead.  The idea that I can juggle an episode each month while also giving attention to longer works is, as of now, done away with.  I am pausing my other projects to focus entirely on the Chronicles and intend to stick with them until what I'm defining in my head as the first "novel" is finished.  Then I will take a break and work on one of the other two projects, to the completion of that as well.

The good news is that a lot of the turbulence that has caused my output to be so low is largely at an end.  Things in my personal life are far more settled at the moment and the result, I hope, will be a lot more words written and a lot more works published.  Even as I write this, the next episode of Chronicles is, in fact, finished.  I see no reason not to put the episodes up as they complete, but I hope that they will come out very rapidly over the next weeks/months until the completion of the novel.

I am also re-editing everything I have on Amazon.  I suck really bad at that, and some of the stuff I have up there is so riddled with issues that it amazes me that readers have managed to say all the nice things they have said.

Call this post a little update, there will be more to come, more regularly than in quite a while...  I hope.

The latest episode of The New Breed Chronicles has finally been released.  To celebrate (and apologize for the monstrous delay) I'm running specials on loads of  my titles.  BREED, DEEP and The NEW BREED CHRONICLES: EPISODE 1 are all going to be free for a few days.  THE NEW BREED CHRONICLES: EPISODES 1-3, THE WAY: GENESIS and WARRIORS OF LIGHT: MEDALLION are all reduced to 99c.

To fans of the series: I'm sorry this took so long.  Sometimes life happens.  Right now me, and my family are living in a mobile home (what I believe is called a trailer in America) in the middle of a field while we finish building our house.  Since the last episode was released we've started building said house, I've also finally been married to the girl I fell in love with back in my first year in college more than ten years ago.  Add that to what has been a very busy year at the old day job and maybe you'll forgive me.  At the end of the day, those are all just excuses.

I really, really, really hope that both the next episode in the series, as well as my next horror novel (LURKER) will see the light of day before too much more time elapses.

All my best to any of you who decide you can tolerate my scribbling!

J.T.

Next New Breed Chronicles

This is just an update to let you know that the next episode of THE NEW BREED CHRONICLES is finished.  She just needs editing and she'll be ready to go.  You should be able to expect her live on Amazon in the next couple of days.

I have a question for the fans of this series.  When I started out these episodes I had a vision of completing one each month and I still plan on trying to reach that pace.  Life, other books, family and business all naturally get in the way of this process.  My question is this:  should I continue to release these short episodes, as I have been doing at irregular intervals, or at this stage would it be better to just wait until the first "Novel" or "Season" has been completed and simply release that when it's ready?

J.T.

Thanks to Reviewers

This is just a really quick post to put something out there.  It's been a while since the release of Breed and the influx of a number of reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.  The majority of these reviews have been very positive.

The reason that I am writing this post is that I want to respond to every review I get but I feel that there must surely be some kind of taboo against that.  If I respond to a positive review and tell the reviewer that I love them and want to have their babies (that's meant to be funny because I'm a man but, because all you guys see is my initials, I guess I need to clarify) then how are they supposed to feel free to give a negative review on my next book.

So I just want to say:

To my positive reviewers:  thank you so much.  You might not know what it's like to log on to Amazon or Goodreads and see some completely unknown person praising your work.  It is an injection of happiness into my day and can put me on a high for hours and days afterwards.

To my negative reviewers: thank you as well.  Sure it's a bummer to see that I didn't strike a chord with you.  But thank you for the comment because you help me get better at this thing that I'm trying to do.

This post is probably inspired because DEEP was recently released with hundreds of free downloads.  This means that reviews are probably on the way and I am, honestly, very anxious.

J.T.

DEEP is out now on Amazon.  It will be free for five days starting tomorrow (Tuesday).  The only price for the free download is that you have to rate it 5 stars and give it a glowing review no matter what a mess it might be to read!  Only joking of course...  unless that would make you give it 5 stars no matter what a mess it is, in which case...