Hark and ho! Sheridan Diggins and the Dead Horde (or Book 1 of The Cecilian Blue-Collar Chronicles) is now listed at JMS Books. The novella won’t be out till mid February, and this will mark my first adult series. Ever.
Firstly, link. Here you go. Get thee hence for the blurb and the excerpt. The entire series is a sci-fi comedy with a side helping of romance. In fact, the romance pretty much pries open a Pandora’s Box of – things – that’ll turn an already whacked out planet into something even more bizarre. The series will follow that arc in an episodic approach a la Masks. In this case, though, unlike Masks, there IS a story arc.
It’s my goal to release a novella per quarter (yes, I’m a Virgo and an INTJ), and somewhere in between will be my usual YA offerings randomly scheduled. At the moment the re-release of the last books I had with Prizm are throwing a wrench into things, and it looks like I need to get those out of the way first before moving forward with a more regular release schedule on the YA front.
Secondly, a few words and a bonus of writerly agonies regarding Sheridan. I actually wrote and self-published this book under a different pen name and under a different market a few months ago. It was my hope that I can expand my reach by writing more mainstream stuff and establishing myself in non-LGBT genre fiction.
As you can tell, that project didn’t last very long. The problem I’d been grappling with even in the process of writing it involved discoverability in a new market under a new name. I was basically back to ground zero, and while that might’ve been a good experiment six or so years ago, before the self-publishing gold rush, it ain’t so realistic now, with the markets so saturated with books from every corner of the publishing world. I’m basically shedding six years of building up a readership for an even riskier attempt at finding a new one with competition being the way it is now.
The long and short of it is that I ended up pulling the book, rewriting it into a gay sci-fi comedy romance, and re-releasing it as such through JMS Books. I do think it’ll be much easier for my current readership to cross-over to my adult stuff and for non-YA readers of gay romance to take a chance on my books – much, much easier than swimming in a HUGE ocean of non-LGBT books as a nobody, waving frantically to get the attention of someone in a limited reader pool.
I used the original cover, which is a really bizarre one, and it fits the tone of the series perfectly. Happily enough, the artist has a series of somewhat related images that I can easily use for future installments.
Incidentally, it’s not a space opera, with Sheridan whizzing about in space, visiting random planets where hijinks rule. No, everything takes place in one small planet called Cecilia, where colonists have evolved in the weirdest way physically and nothing more.
You can take the man out of Earth, but you can’t take Earth out of the man. Or something like that, anyway. That’s pretty much the idea behind the workings of colonists and friendly alien neighbors on Cecilia. I’ll be promoting the book when it comes out over at The Novel Approach, as usual, and I’ll scour this corner of the web for more places where I can request reviews and even do additional giveaways when the time comes.
And here we go with another second edition release! :) The Twilight Gods is now available in e-book format directly from JMS Books, LLC. 
