Greetings!

Some news and announcements to start off:

I’ve signed contracts with Curiosity Quills to publish The Harmony Paradox (sequel to Virtual Immortality), and Dead Man’s Number (Book 3 of the Roadhouse Chronicles). Release dates have not been set yet (at least not that I am aware). The first book in the Roadhouse Chronicles series (One More Run) is due to release December 2016.

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Also, my next release is nine days away – The Far Side of Promise, is an anthology of my short stories due out on the 14th of November. This collection is the result of a combination of my overactive imagination and a suggestion from CQ. Back in 2014, they put out a call for short story submissions for the Chronology antho. At the time, I hadn’t done much in the way of short story writing, but I decided to give it a go.

I sat down and tried to think of a story idea… and got a pile of them. Being on the indecisive side, I wound up writing all of them and sending them all in. Lisa from CQ remarked that I sent them so many stories they should print an anthology of just mine. (Which we wound up doing).

Initially, Emma and the Banderwigh was a short story included in this batch. One of my beta readers adored it so much they asked me to expand on it and turn it into a full novel. While CQ was processing all the short story submissions for the Chronology antho, I wound up doing that and wrote the novelized form of Banderwigh.

I spent about a week or so hemming and hawing about having both a short story form and novel form of Banderwigh, and I ultimately decided to drop the short story from the Far Side of Promise anthology and replace it with something else. I batted around ideas for other short stories, but one concept kept coming back to the forefront. I wound up writing Innocent Deception to replace the Emma and the Banderwigh short, and sent it to CQ fully expecting it to be too late for Chronology, and as part of my antho.

Turns out, CQ liked Innocent Deception the most, and that’s the story that got in to Chronology alongside quite a few other wonderful writers (including Piers Anthony).

The Far Side of Promise antho has been in production for quite some time. Due to that, more of the stories within it wound up getting made into full novels. One More Run started off as a short story, but a fellow CQ author, Will Stanton read it and suggested that I expand that concept into a novel. (If you like post apocalyptic fiction, check out his book – The Artful),

Initially, I novelized One More Run starting where the short story left off… but beta readers had some confusion issues, and it didn’t seem right to send people hunting for the short story to read before the novel… so I wound up putting the short story into the front end of the novel.

Daughter of Mars (a short story in FSOP) grew into The Hand of Raziel (book one of the Daughter of Mars series.)

(A similar situation arose with Innocent Deception when CQ asked me to write more in that setting.) The novel Heir Ascendant is a continuation of the short story, but the short is embedded at the front of the book so people who haven’t seen Chronology (or Far Side of Promise) get the whole story.

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Other things

I’m offering signed paperbacks of The Summer the World Ended for a limited time at $10 each (plus $3 shipping). For more information, please email me at mcox2112 (gmail).

Emma and the Silk Thieves (Book 2 of Tales of Widowswood) is done with proofreading and on its way into the production queue for a January 2017 release date. The third book in the series (Emma and the Silverbell Faeries) is currently with CQ’s beta reader.

That’s about all I can think of as being new for the time being…

Happy reading all 🙂

 

-Matt

Greetings,

Been somewhat busy as of late working on two more manuscripts.

The Harmony Paradox, a sequel to Virtual Immortality came out at 233k words and is currently in beta reading. The events of that story resume eight months after the end of VI, following Nina, Joey, Kenny, Katya, and Masaru.

Struggling still to come to terms with what she has become, Nina adopts an orphan girl after a soul-crushing investigation in hopes of clinging to her humanity. She draws a seemingly-routine case that goes deeper than she initially suspects.

Joey is settling in to his new role as a network analyst for Division 9. He discovers not all is as he believed in regards to the AI he believed he’d destroyed, and a desperate plea from the sister he can’t stand sets his life on an unexpected course.

With his wife clear of drugs and home, Kenny is looking forward to a few years of calm to be with his family. When the Syndicate appears to ask a little too firmly for his assistance recovering an artifact from the Badlands, he decides to bring the entire clan rather than be separated from them. Eldon is skeptical of his stories about The Sentience, but young Hayley seems to feel the demon’s presence.

Katya has emigrated to the UCF and tentatively entertains the hope that she may be free of her former corporate masters. With an unusual roommate to look after, an eight-year-old girl who’s been alive for twenty years, she decides to try for a normal life. Alas, her skill set seems suited for a particular line of work, and a seemingly easy data acquisition job gets complicated.

Masaru has returned to Japan, drawn back into the life of a CEOs middle son. The expected boredom of his first official duty as a representative of Kurotai Electronics takes a dangerous turn, and he finds himself questioning not only what he wants out of life, but his entire nation.

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I’ve also completed the first draft of Emma and the Silverbell Faeries, the third book in the Tales of Widowswood series. In this book, Emma answers a plea from a faerie, and unwittingly travels through a fey circle into another world to protect them against mystically enraged animals that seem bent on destroying the Silverbells to the last faerie.

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Event! – I will be at the Collingswood Book Festival tomorrow, Saturday 10/1/16. I’m looking forward to meeting readers and signing books.

More details here: http://www.collingswoodbookfestival.com/

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I’d also like to thank everyone who has recently posted a review of Chiaroscuro – The Mouse and the Candle, The Hand of Raziel, or Nine Candles of Deepest Black. I still have some review copies available (including older titles). If interested, please email me at mcox 2112 @ gmail .com with a request and a link to your blog.

 

Happy reading!

-Matt

Okay, so yet again it’s been awhile since I’ve posted an update here. The whole blogging thing is something that came about as a result of my foray into the world of publishing. I consider myself fortunate to have been signed by Curiosity Quills press for my fiction novels, and one of the things they advised early on was for me to have a blog.

 

One may wonder how someone who can write 100k+ word novels would have difficulty dropping a blog post in here and there. Well, for one thing, coming up with a story in a novel format seems to come easy for me. Finding things to write about on a blog though, is another story. Perhaps I could toss up random opinion pieces about various things, but the internet is already full of that. I don’t really consider myself an authority on any particular subject (though I can fake my way through sounding like a writer well enough I suppose). Granted, writers writing about writing is about as cliché as the mirror trope of chapter one. Alas, I’ve done it – I’ll probably do it again just for something to post about… probably after the next recurring issue irks me while editing other people’s stuff.

When I first started this blog back in 2013 (soon after CQ signed Division Zero #1), I struggled to find stuff to write about. I got what I thought was a good idea: I know, I’ll do a fiction serial! So, I started posting a story in (initially 500 word, but they got fatter as time passed) increments, once a week. Originally, I titled it “Divergent Fates,” which is the name that I’d been using for the setting [that I first developed for a custom roleplaying game] back in 1996. (No, it has nothing to do with the Divergent series, just shares one word.) The premise of the story (and title) referred to Earth and Mars going in different directions (politically) and the increasing rift between Earth government and the citizenry of colonized Mars.

 

With the Division Zero and the Awakened series (set in the same world), there is an emphasis on psionics. With this story, I let the paranormal fade to the background to delve into an old-school cyberpunk story, only set on Mars.

 

Fast forward two-ish years.

 

I posted another installment to the serial fiction here, and I thought, “hey, this kinda sounds like the end of a novel… a good place to stop.” That made me look back at the whole of the posts and I found that I’d gotten about 101k words down. The whole time I’d been posting these stories, I’d been working on other novels, but lo and behold, I had a rough cut of another novel ready to go. (It kind of felt like some mystical entity came out of nowhere and wrote a book for me – ahh the disassociation of time.)

 

I checked with CQ to see if they’d entertain the idea of publishing a book that had been “out in the wild” as a blog thing for over a year, and they were receptive to the idea. I collated all the posts into a manuscript form and did some reworking to make sure the thing flowed. (One downside to the serial format was that each blog post had a “chapter ending” feel to it, even though they were too small for a chapter.) After ‘mortaring all the bricks together’ with additional text, the manuscript grew to about 140k words.

 

And thus, The Hand of Raziel came to be. (Released August 8 2016). Note: ebook copies are available in exchange for honest reviews. (Email me to request).

 

The next two books in the Daughter of Mars series I wrote with my normal process (they weren’t ever posted online). Aside from me not taking two years to finish them, it made the editing process a lot easier.

 

Paperbacks for Hand of Raziel should be available soon, but I don’t have any firm date yet for when.

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I would like to send out a big thank you to everyone who has read and reviewed my vampire novel, Chiaroscuro – The Mouse and the Candle. I am overwhelmed by the surge of positive reviews, which has far exceeded my expectations. It’s humbling to see that so many people enjoyed the story I wrote.

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Next month, on September 15^th, my third young-adult novel is coming out. Nine Candles of Deepest Black is a YA horror (the first time I’ve set out to write a horror novel on purpose), that follows sixteen year old Paige Thomas as her family moves out a quiet little town in the wake of a family tragedy. Soon after arriving, introvert Paige gets drawn in to a group of local outcasts who have been dabbling with witchcraft in an effort to improve their lives, but nothing has happened. Paige has a gift, last seen to manifest in her maternal grandmother, who everyone thought was ‘eccentric.’ When her new friends invite her to their ‘circle,’ Hell (quite literally) breaks loose.

https://www.facebook.com/events/572746646267202/

I’m doing a Facebook release party on 9/15. All are welcome to join in from 7-9 pm Eastern time for a chance to win some stuff.

 

Book Bloggers/reviewers: Early review copies of Nine Candles are available. Email me at mcox2112 (gmail), or email Marketing (@curiosityquills.com) to request.

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I am currently working on the first draft of The Harmony Paradox, a sequel to Virtual Immortality. I’m nearing the end and expect it to come out to about 200k words (around the same size as VI.) I’ve also got a story plotted out for Emma and the Silverbell Faeries (Book 3 in my middle grade fantasy series, Tales of Widowswood). The second book in that series, Emma and the Silk Thieves, is due out this coming January.

 

Anyway, I suppose that’s enough of a ramble for now.

 

Happy reading,

-Matt