There's no business like snow business
It's not all blizzards this week. We also talk about book news, reading guides, world guides and spoilers!
Hey, I hope where you are, it’s sunny and warm not snowing and cold. (I am Ran, Sarn’s son from the Curse Breaker series.)
Since I have to go to my scribe’s apartment to write to you each week, I’m inside where’s warm. But it’s snowing outside, and they predict 16-20 inches of wet white stuff will fall on my scribe’s part of NY by the time the snow stops sometime on Monday.
So there’s a lot of shoveling in my scribe’s future. She’s not happy about that as you probably expect. Melinda says she’s done enough shoveling this winter. Mother Nature doesn’t agree since she’s sending more snow right now. So Melinda’s doing a lot of grumbling about that in between meetings.
I’m not sure if she’s noticed her complaints aren’t doing anything to stop the snow. I’d tell her, but I want more page time. So I’m being a good character and not mentioning that.
Book News
Our last kickstarter is 100% fulfilled for ebooks and all physical books have been ordered. So now we just wait for them to print and ship. So that’s exciting.
While we do that, let’s check on Curse Breaker Jousts.
My scribe has written and posted 36 chapters on Patreon and Substack, and you can read them right now if you’d like.
How many more chapters until the end?
We never know that, especially with Curse Breaker books. But if I had to guess, there could be 10-20 chapters left. We’ll find out in the next few weeks and see if my estimate was right or totally off base.
So far, we have some cozy healing/family time, a joust, magic-eating monsters, and now we have zombies since the rider of the apocalypse just showed up, and she’s a necromancer. No idea how many chapters we’ll need to defeat her and the dead she raised.
In Chapter 34, (which went live this past weekend because writing is an important part of storm prep. Ask any author and they will confirm that.) There’s a callback to the events of Spell of Shadow & Light.
If you haven’t read that prequel yet—or if it’s been a while—you might want to brush up on it. There are things happening in the jousts that started a long time ago in that story.
If you don’t have it, grab a copy of Spell of Shadow & Light on our shop.
What’s Spell of Shadow & Light about?
As ancient evils and monster-making summoners rise from the depths, Nulthir and his OwlCat companions must race to break the spell before he transforms into a monster himself.
You can also get it at other retailers too so you’re ready for the big reveal in Curse Breaker Jousts!
(If asked, I will confirm we planned it that way. But you know didn’t. This link between the two books just kind of happened for plot reasons. We must always keep the plot happy.)
Reading Guide
A backer asked about a reading guide and Melinda swung into action creating version 1.0 of a reading guide, and we sent it to all backers who gave us an email to send it to. It includes the order for all books in all series set in my world and some information about it all pulled from Melinda’s author website of course!
But that got me thinking. What if we did a more comprehensive version? What if we made a world guide?
I’m still figuring out what would be in such a book. If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them since this book is for you, not me. I will of course try to get as much page time as I can because it’s a book, and that’s what I do.
I do have some ideas for the World Guide, but Melinda says I can’t fill the whole thing with pictures of me. What would you actually want to see?
A Bestiary of the creatures we encountered?
A Timeline showing how all the series actually fit together?
Info about the magic system?
Character bios?
How tos?
P.S. If you’re looking for the Reading Guide 1.0 and didn't get it, or if you want to start one of the other series while waiting for Jousts to finish, you can find the whole library here.
Version 1.0 is the series pages in pdf form since Melinda redid them over the last few weeks to have fun facts and some information about the world. If you’d like a PDF copy, no worries, just hop over to BookFunnel and download it here.
That’s it for this week. Please think warm thoughts and enjoy a good book! (Extra points if I appear in it.)
Also! Make sure to follow our next kickstarter, so you can get early copies of Curse Breaker Jousts! It’s going to be truly epic!
Sorry about the shoveling. We had some inches, and we should have mostly higher temperatures in the coming days (unless last time when there was a storm followed by much lower temperatures). I appreciate your composing a Reader's Guide. As if the scribe doesn't have enough to do. You and Ran stay warm (as you can).