May the books be with you

More behind the scenes chaos comes at you in this issue plus some spoilers!

May 11, 2026

Welcome back! Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there. I hope you had a restful day of reading and doing what fill you up!

It’s Monday again, so it’s time to talk about books, check in on progress, and see what’s happening. This is Ran, Sarn’s son from the Curse Breaker Series. I like to confirm every week that’s really me because you can’t see me writing this, and I don’t want you to wonder if another character took over and pretended to be me.

That didn’t happen, but I’m always on the lookout for suspicious characters who might try to take over because you never know. If I can find the portal to my scribe’s apartment, then so could another character.

It’s even more possible now that the portal relocated with us to Inari and Nolo’s apartment. Lots of people visit and they could get curious about the glowing purple hoop that floats around the apartment. It mostly hangs out in the living room, right across from the outer door. So anyone could just walk through it.

That didn’t happen today. It’s really me! And I can prove it.

In Chasing Dragons, told Jerlo he should play with magic. No one else would tell him to do that, am I right?

In the sequel, Curse Breaker Jousts, Jerlo once again tries to convince my dad that magic is bad. But I won’t let him get away with that!

I’m plotting my revenge—I mean I’m plotting how to prove my point. I need him to stop telling my dad not to use magic. How can I learn anything if he doesn’t use magic?

So that should prove it’s me writing this. I am the only character in the Curse Breaker Series who’s kind of obsessed with magic. I’m trying to get my dad to obsess over it, but there’s some competition for his attention right now.

Anyway, that’s enough spoilers for this week. Now for the promised book news!

Last week, I told you about the six things our scribe is working on while I plot in the shadows about how to get more page time (and more magic). Don’t tell her I’m doing that.

Let’s review those 6 things and find out what progress we made this week!

Spoiler alert! There are only 5 things now because one item got ticked off the list.

1. New Distributor & New Books

We got the proof copy and it looks great!

Since we might use this printer for fulfillment for our next Kickstarter, Melinda decided she should prioritize getting all our books set up on there. We have no idea what will happen with tariffs and shipping costs.

BUT this new-to-us printer is in the US. So that could help us keep the printing and shipping costs from ballooning out of control.

There’s a lot involved in that for each book, so that’s going to take a while. But we have enough time to get all our books set up there before we run the next Kickstarter. So far, the first 3 books of the Curse Breaker Series are in the process of getting set up. We’re waiting for the digital proof to be ready so we can check them.

(For some reason I these two items listed separately last week. But the new distributor is also a printer, so I should have combined them into one listing. I didn’t last week, but this week I did because they are the same company.)

2. Chaos Reigns Plot Questions

Since Chaos Reigns takes place during Curse Breaker books 9-12 (Curse Breaker Revealed, Shards For His Gift, Chasing Dragons & Curse Breaker Jousts) and the Rogue Gods Trilogy, how much of those events should we show in that book?

I convinced Melinda to keep all the events for the first draft and then once the book is done or close to it, she can go back and figure out what can be cut. I don’t think she can figure that out before then since she’s only taking events that featured Fay, Misriah or Sovvan and reworking them to show what was going on with the wraths during those events because there was a powerful wrath flying around causing serious issues.

If you read the Rogue Gods Trilogy, then you know which one.

Melinda posted chapters 14-17 on Patreon and Substack this week. You can read them now.

3. Too Many Books + Upcoming Paperback Sale

Melinda still has too many books and we’re working on taking inventory so we can do a sale. We ran into a logistical issue this week. There’s nowhere to put the extra books temporarily so they are separate from the copies we want to keep. So Melinda is rearranging some things. I should help, but it looks like a lot of work. Maybe I’ll just sit here and write to you instead.

4. All You Can Read on Patreon

We didn’t get to test this much this week. But it’s still on the list. If we can pull this off, we could include our books in the tiers so Patrons can get our published ebooks as part of their membership.

This moved down in priority only because Melinda is updating the front and back matter for all our books and re-encoding all our epubs for the new distributor/printer.

We’re not 100% certain if our older ebooks would give you an error in a newer ereader, but we don’t want that to happen. The new version of the epub software has all kinds of updates for things that we don’t understand, and those updates could be important. So why not update the encoding on all our epubs just in case?

5. Special Editions

Melinda started working on the special edition for Curse Breaker Jousts. She did an initial formatting pass to make sure chapters fall on the correct pages and to assess what do we need in terms of imagery. Since it’s a Curse Breaker book and one that Melinda has wanted to write for 14 years, she created some artwork for it over the years. So she’s trying to decide which to include because they were part of the journey.

Don’t forget to follow the project on Kickstarter: