State of Writing

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Success! I have finished Wolves of the Tesseract 3! I completed the epilogue last night at about 11pm. It still needs a lot of polish and I made numerous notes for scenes I need to add or places and characters I need to revise/add/inflate before I even put the story down, so I’ll try to do some of that over the next couple days so I can put this story away for a few months and come back to it in the new year.

What I’m really happy about, though, is that I completed two stories in two months, like nanowrimo, and then double nanowrimo. I began Gunslinger of Dystalgia on October 15 for my first book and then launched the very next day into The Architect King and burned through another 90k words to complete it by Dec 15.

No celebrations. No fanfare or banner waving on sites like 20Booksto50K… just the pride of doing it. Now, somebody buy or review, dangit 😉

I need a nap.

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Holiday Idea: Autographed Books

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With the holidays coming up, I wanted to remind you that books make great gifts! I do have a stock of paperbacks and I am totally willing to sign it to whomever you want if you want to pick up an autographed copy (send me a message and I can make it happen–but do it quickly to account for holiday shipping time).
You can check out all of my titles on my amazon author page here:

http://amazon.com/author/christopherdschmitz

State of Writing

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Hey friends! I haven’t posted a State of Writing in about a month, (it’s a weekly ordeal for me on Mondays.) I wanted to spend every scrap of time writing through November. And it paid off!

I didn’t officially participate in Nanowrimo. Between huge year-end promotions, a book launch, and the actual writing, I just didn’t need one more thing to have to update. That said, I did write a book in November: I completed the second installment of my unreleased series about Merlin’s secret rings. I think The Gunslinger of Dystaslias is around 50-60k words in its first draft. But wait, there’s more! I kept on writing and launched directly into Wolves of the Tesseract: The Architect King which will complete the series. I’m a little over 63,000 words right now and hope to finish the book in less than two weeks (about 30k more words to go or so!)

I’d keep blogging, but I gotta get back to writing!

Critical Feedback on 50 Shades of Worf

 

I paid a for a critique service to get me some feedback on 50 Shades of Worf and got a few pieces I can use in marketing.  I don’t plan to use the below review of the book, but I found it gratifying on another level. One of the reasons authors write is to change the world, to make it better by causing people to think, and this reviewer picked up on a piece within the book.

While I usually try to weave some kind of moral threads into the fabric of my book, I didn’t really try with this one. I just wanted to make a fun book that my fellow nerds could enjoy reading. apparently, some of my do-gooder-ness came through anyway as spotted by this reviewer, Charles Remington. Maybe it was easier for him to spot it since he was definitely not my target audience, which led to quite a different filter which he read it through.

Christopher D. Schmitz’s 50 Shades of Worf follows the adventures of police officer Moses Farnsworth. A self-confessed geek, his desk is littered with plastic Marvel Comic heroes and figures from the world of fantasy. Finally plucking up the courage to seek promotion and take the detective exam, he is surprised to pass with flying colors. He is even more surprised to find himself partnered with Rick Diego, a tough, experienced cop still grieving the loss of his long-time partner who was deliberately crushed by falling machinery during a drug bust. It is not long, however, before it becomes apparent why this mismatched pair has been partnered when they are assigned to protect an actor from the Star Trek series, who will be launching his new film project at TrollCON, a local conference for fans of the genre. But Rick Diego is determined to bring the killers responsible for his partner’s death to justice, and as they embark on their joint mission, Diego soon realizes that, somewhat incredibly, the murder of his partner, TrollCON, and those involved in the funding of the new film are connected. Having no knowledge of the people, practices or etiquette of these conferences, Diego depends heavily on his new partner’s knowledge and expertise to help him to blend in. Together, the unlikely pair manages to muddle through a sometimes dangerous, sometimes baffling, sometimes scary, but often hilarious investigation.

I must admit that my knowledge of the type of conference described in 50 Shades of Worf was as vague as that of Officer Rick Diego, and I found myself looking up terms like cosplayers, furries, and bronies. However, I am pleased to have learned a lot about the outlandish world these eccentric characters inhabit. Perhaps this passage from the book, in the words of Officer Farnsworth explaining the conference to Rick Diego, could shed some light on the subject: ‘Not everybody is good at life. For people who don’t feel like they fit in, Fantasy helps them escape those bad feelings. We’re not stuck on the outside anymore. We’re finally important… and I honestly believe that everyone feels like that at some point in their life.’ In the end, I felt that the additional research was worth it. I enjoyed the book and it opened up a world which, being a sci-fi fan but located in the wilds of Scotland, I knew very little about. Schmitz has imbued his narrative with loveable characters and a great deal of fun. A fine read for geeks and non-geeks alike.

50 Shades of Worf
A back-alley brawl between the furries and the bronies.
Deadpool cosplayer keeps stealing all the erotic pegasus artwork.
Someone used a necronomicon to open a tentacle portal in the men’s room.
Two cops must go undercover at a comic-book convention to stop Wil Wheaton’s murder. You’ll love this buddy cop comic-comedy if you love Discworld, Hitchhikers Guide, or Bimbos From the Death Sun.

Check it out here:
https://storyoriginapp.com/universalbooklinks/8705a392-fcb9-11e9-b3dc-5fabe5bfea32

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