A few more to go

Updates. I’ve sent the first 13 chapters of the Slaying of the Bull (book 1 in the Tocharian Gospels series) off to my launch squad (click on the link for more details) for review and feedback and will deliver more as I work through the book. I’m doing editing in 3 chapter chunks. If you’re interested in getting a first look and want to join the squad, it is not too late! Drop me a line here. Everyone is welcome. Even if you find only one typo, it goes a long way to helping me out! I don’t have an editor, and buying one’s services is very expensive (between $1,200 to $5,000)! Seeing the book probably won’t make more than a couple hundred dollars until I can get an audience, I can’t justify that cost right now. So volunteers are more than welcome!

I still need to write one more chapter. It is second to the last in the book, so I have some time, and its framed out, so it should go on the page quickly. I am also debating whether to write a prologue and epilogue. The prologue will help tie the book to the rest of the series (and I have a good idea for that), and the epilogue will go through the characters in bullet-like fashion and give some details of what happened to them after the time the book takes place.

Ultimately, the Slaying of the Bull will fall into the historical fiction genre. Therefore, I’ve based many of my characters on people that existed in history (and there are a lot of real places and real events in the book). Of course, I took great liberty in creating the personalities of these characters and sent them on journeys that I can’t support with documentation, but ultimately they were real people. We are talking about the 13th century here, so the individual details are sparse. At best, I have a few critical moments in their life as a reference. The epilogue will help show how the events of my book influenced their future lives, and with about 70 percent of my characters based on real people, it is quite the luxury to have some of that information. I will pick and choose and fictionalize what I include so that it won’t be a glossary, but I don’t want to just leave those stories untold. I will also format the Kindle version for X-ray. If you don’t know what that is, it allows me to link specific terms and people to sites like Wikipedia so that the reader can click on the term and get a definition or some background information. Not many people have a lot of knowledge of the 13th century, and there are some key terms and historical events that many might not know. X-ray gives me an awesome opportunity to illuminate how deep the story goes (and something that wasn’t possible even a few years ago). This Kindle option will certainly help in my goals, but the epilogue will point the reader to certain specifics that will be important to the rest of the series.

So I guess that makes the decisions for me. Damn. I thought I was finished. Oh well. That is one of the significant side-effects of writing a daily blog. I might not have many followers, but it certainly helps flesh out my thoughts. Reading back over the last paragraph, it becomes pretty clear that I should write these two other chapters. The story wouldn’t suffer without them, but with them, it will blend better into the Tocharian Gospels series, make the story more interesting, and illuminate a lot of the subtleties. Well, I guess I still have some work to do.

Cheers!