Hang onto your pants: A wild ride's ahead!

May 08, 2023

Hey!

It’s Ran, your loveable narrator from the Curse Breaker series. That’s right, I’m back again. I promised I would be, but I never know if I’ll have to fight another character for the honor of writing to you. Actually, Melinda, my faithful scribe, is writing this, but I am dictating it to her. So these are my words. She reads them back to me so I can make sure of that.

Before I dive back into things, I want to return to the discussion from last week’s newsletter about AI.

Every author needs to find their own comfort level with AI and what they’ll use it for. Please don’t think we’re against it because we’re not. LLMs and other text generators are the new shiny object on the block.

But I just wanted you to know that I don’t take orders from anyone, not even my scribe, much to her annoyance.

Would our books come out faster if I did listen to someone sometimes?

Probably. Am I going to start listening?

Nope. I only listen Papa since he can drop a shield around me and make me listen. He also thinks more than he speaks, so I have to listen when he talks because I don’t know when he’ll say something next.

But Melinda can’t put a shield around me, so I don’t have to listen to her. And it’s not just me who doesn’t listen. I trained my fellow characters well. They don’t listen either!

But who am I? I am Ran, as I said earlier, and I’m the sidekick to the most powerful introvert who happens to be a curse breaker when his magic allows. Its fickle like my relationship with outlines and instructions of all kinds.

That said, let’s get back to today’s newsletter. Last week, I begged for page time and asked you to beg for it on my behalf. Since no one did, I didn’t get anymore page time this week. I got plenty of scenes in other weeks, so I guess that’s fair.

But you’ll join me in lobbying Melinda, my Scribe, to write the sequel next, right?

(She plans to finish Rogue Rescue instead of working on Curse Breaker Jousts. She might still be annoyed at me because I might have said that Shards For His Gift would be a shorter story, but it turned out not to be.

I’m not sure why that’s my fault since there are other characters in the book who had scenes and subplots too. Those characters should shoulder some of the blame, right?

Those subplots need to have all the action and drama you crave, so why would the book be short? Melinda should know better.

And speaking of Shards For His Gift, the next full-length novel in the Curse Breaker series, it’s still not done. So I can still get some more page time. It’s 55 chapters long so far with an additional 10 chapters that are more like outlines that none of us, characters, will stick to. They’re more like guidelines than rules.

So this book will probably clock in around 70 chapters like usual, so you get lots of mayhem (and dragons, magical crystals, misbehaving magic, etc.) for your bucks. So now’s a really good time to catch up on the Curse Breaker series.

Shards For His Gift might be our first book with footnotes since it refers to events in 15 other books, so we can skip the flashbacks and just tell you what book has the scene that shows the event referenced. So that’s exciting.

Melinda was going to just write a really long author note explaining where to find the scenes mentioned, and she probably still will because she’s detail oriented like that. But I think footnotes are even better because then when you see them, you can ignore them if you want, or if you don’t recall the event in question, the little footnote thing can tell you what book to find it in.

I think the footnotes should be small and furry like my friend Furball, but the Scribe said that might be hard to read. So if we do them, they will just be text.

How did we decide this?

We had a poll a while back, and polls are like suggestions. So I can follow them since they aren’t telling me what do unlike an outline.

What books are referenced?

Well, all nine books in the Curse Breaker series that come before Shards For His Gift. The most frequently referenced books are Curse Breaker Enchanted (book 1), Curse Breaker Hidden (book 6), and Curse Breaker Revealed (book 9) and His Angelic Keeper Tempted.

But there are also references the Robin of Larkspur series, specifically events in Hunter’s Night (book 1), Rogue Ranger (book 3), Rogue Rescue (book 4), and Rogue Gods (book 5).

But wait! Rogue Rescue, and Rogue Gods aren’t written yet. How can Shards For His Gift reference them?

I can’t answer that because it spoils a twist early on in Rogue Rescue.

This is crazy, right?

Well, it turns out it’s no so crazy after all. Parts of them are already written or exist as notes and outlines. I don’t know if Robin will follow them, and I won’t ask her either because she might try to takeover this newsletter if I do.

My dad won’t (Sarn from the Curse Breaker series) because he can’t read, so how would he know what the notes or outline says?

Who would tell him? I’m just a baby in those books, so I can’t do it, and my uncle is back at Mount Eredren. So he can’t tell him either, and I don’t know where Robin stands on the outlines issue.

Are they more like guidelines to her or rules that must be broken to deliver the most exciting story possible?

Maybe I’ll ask her and report back next week. In the meantime, hang onto your pants. Wild times are ahead.

And you can read drafts of the 55 chapters that make up Shards For His Gift and the first bunch of chapters from Rogue Rescue right now on our Patreon. You get a copy of the final book when we let Melinda finalize it.

She posts 4 chapters per week even though we refuse to follow directions. Somehow she still gets us to the end of each chapter and eventually to the end of the book. But there’s a lot of fighting and negotiating in between those two points.

That’s it for this week! See you next Monday for more.