Revision 7 is Done

I had to make a quick post to celebrate the completion of Revision 7 of First Act of War. The book is almost ready to go out to publishers and I'm ready to send to beta readers for a final pass before we start hitting up the major publishers for a big advance!

So, if you're a serious reader and would like to review a fantasy novel before it hits shelves, please leave a comment and let me know.

I feel like I'm starting to really move forward.

Thanks to everyone who has helped so far, and thanks to everyone (in advance) that I'm going to lean on as I get things rolling toward publication.

The Evil that is Cityville

I must admit, I enjoy a good game. My favorite games of all time are older ones from the glory days of the console stations. Warsong and Final Fantasy IV and VII have a special place in my heart. I will even bust out my DOS Box application every now and then to play Master of Magic.

Ah, those were good days!

Unfortunately, we now have mass click games on phones and Facebook that have permeated every aspect of our social media lives. I cannot escape Cityville, and thanks to me, many of you can't either. Sometimes it seems like we Cityville players are doing nothing more than hemorrhaging meaningless posts. Please realize that this is not the case!

Each seemingly meaningless post through Cityville is actually a chance for the poster to gain essential items whereby continuing the self perpetuating nonsense. Each quest completed leads to another and in case you want to skip a few, every week Zynga comes out with a few more just to make sure you always have something to do in your city.

As a result of Cityville, I am now "Facebook Friends" with people I have never met in my life. Truly a remarkable occurrence. My wife plays Cityville as well, or at least, she has a Facebook account and I maintain her city for her (she has never actually logged on). This leads to interesting situations when people IM her through Facebook while I'm updating her city in Cityville. Most of the time I just pretend to be her, and hope I remember to tell her what she said to whomever it was she wasn't actually speaking with...

Several people I "friended" because of Cityville have some rather strong political ideas, so now my Facebook page is splashed with equal parts Republican and Democrat haters. What's interesting is that none of them excitedly talk about what their party is doing. They ALL just talk about how the other party is evil. The other funny thing is that both sides blame the other for causing the exact same problems. Then there's the Snooki updates...

I'm now the target for hourly ads from Zynga promoting other massive wastes of time carefully disguised as addicting games, while the side panel of my Facebook page is littered with ads for games from other companies. How do they know I play Cityville? Could it be they're watching my posts?

Well... all out of time... I need to go harvest some crops and upgrade my police station. At this next level I get a Superhero and I don't need to worry about donuts anymore!

Hm... It occurs to me that most of you will not understand that last sentence.

Count yourselves lucky.

Where He At?

It's been awhile, and I feel I owe you all some explanations.

I've been working diligently on First Act of War, and I'm coming up on the end of revision 7. This is huge because R7 has witnessed some wholesale changes and improvements. I'm excited about the changes and I owe great gobs of gratitude to my agent: Paul Muller for teaching me how to edit.

Editing is not the same as writing. It is a different art form altogether. (See previous posts for more details.)

Bottom line, I will be done with the major rewrite by the end of the month, and we will be submitting the book next month to publishers. If we can't get a publisher to bite, then I'll most likely self publish it in ebook format on Amazon and B&N.

I'll keep you posted.