The Adelfian Prophecies Series, now on Facebook!

Guess what, everybody? My epic fantasy series, The Adelfian Prophecies, now has its own Facebook page, where you can not only keep up to date on all the latest happenin's as I continue writing the series, but also take part in discussions about the series, ask questions about already-released or upcoming books, share favorite scenes or characters, talk about what the stories mean to you...and well, maybe even get a sneak peek or two.
I'd love for you to join me, so visit facebook.com/TheAdelfianProphecies, like the page, and let the journey begin!

Interview and Giveaway at HomeschooledAuthors.com

Hey, all! Just thought I'd let you know that Song of the Wren-Falcon and I are being featured this week over on homeschooledauthors.com with an interview and a book review.
Not only that, we're giving away a signed copy of the book, so be sure to pop 'round and enter for your chance to win!

Song of the Wren-Falcon Trailer Now Live!

So, I know it's unbelievably late in coming, but after way too many technical struggles and complications, the official Song of the Wren-Falcon trailer is live!

Enjoy! And of course, be sure to let me know what you think!

Interview at The Dreaming Hobbit

Hey, all! Just thought I'd let you know that my dear friend and fellow spec-fic writer Emily Tjaden has been gracious enough to interview me about my writing in general and Song of the Wren-Falcon in particular.
Click Here to visit her blog, The Dreaming Hobbit, and read the interview!

Join the Discussion!

I know that at least most of you who have ordered a paperback copy of Song of the Wren-Falcon won't have your books yet, but I also know that some of you have already purchased the e-book version and started reading. (Give yourselves a hug for me.)
If that's the case, of course post your review on Amazon as soon as possible. Nothing helps a book get off to a good start like getting some good reviews right off the bat.
But once that's done, you can also pop in at Shelfari.com and join in a discussion about the book! General impressions are welcome, of course, but I'd love to get some deeper conversations going as well. How did the book make you feel? What did the story make you think about? Do you have a favorite or least favorite character? Who, and why? What are you hoping to see in the sequel? (You know, the kind of conversation you and a friend might have talking about books over a cup of hot chocolate.)

I'm excited to hear your thoughts. Chime in and let's get talking!

The Song of the Wren-Falcon Now Available on Kindle!

Well, it's Day 3 of The Song of the Wren-Falcon's existence as a published book, and it's a special day because it's now available as an e-book as well as in print!
I know some of you awesome people out there have already ordered your own print copies, and may I just say - you rock. But for those of you who prefer the e-book format (or who just can't wait for the print copy to arrive in the mail), the e-book is here!

Click Here to download the Kindle format.

Click Here for other e-book formats.

And of course, no matter what format you read The Song of the Wren-Falcon in, don't forget to write a review and post it on Amazon, GoodReads, and blogs. I'm looking forward to hearing what you think! :D

It's Here!

That's right, everybody. After seven-and-a-half years, eight drafts, countless revisions, and a title change, my first novel is now published and available.

Don't take this as bragging on my part (I didn't design the cover, after all) but...isn't it gorgeous? And really, I don't just mean the cover art. I mean the whole thing--the fact that it's finally--finally!--after all these years, 100% complete and out there on the market for real.
I've had the goal of becoming a published novelist since I was fourteen years old. Twelve years of struggling and striving. One hour ago, my book went live and that goal was achieved. Just like that I passed an incredible milestone and entered a whole new chapter of this wildly amazing adventure that God has dragged me along on.
And He's the reason for it all. Without Him, I never would have been able to see this novel through to the end. He is the One who gave me the endurance I needed, the One who held me up when I wanted to fall, the One who saw fit to plant a tiny little seed of an idea in my imagination, when He could so easily have chosen someone else, and so patiently helped me nurture and raise it into the amazing story it is today. I can say that without bragging too, because in a lot of ways I don't feel like I wrote this story at all. It was all God, and I was just the pen He chose to use.
I'm not a perfect pen; I know that I've made mistakes along the way, and that the book isn't perfect in all the ways it could be; but I can still say with absolute confidence that this is God's story. I have witnessed the transformation He has performed, from "tiny story seed", through "Mary's rather shallow interpretation thereof", to the story it is today. I know what God has used this story to teach me about Himself, and that is what gives me the assurance that He can use it to bless the lives of others as well, whether that blessing comes in the form of challenging someone to think about honor and loyalty and forgiveness in new and deeper ways, giving someone a new perspective of God's sovereignty, or simply letting someone enjoy an adventure.

I'm a writer; it's my job to tell a great story that readers will love. My livelihood depends on people buying and enjoying my book, so naturally I have to encourage you to hop on over and order your copy of Song of the Wren-Falcon. I want you to read it, love it, post reviews, put it in your local library, keep it on your bookshelf, share it, and recommend it. I want to hear your feedback and learn what you thought of it. I want you to be blessed by it.
But more importantly, I would love for each and every one of you to join me in thanking and praising God. Thank Him for allowing me to write this story. Thank Him for helping me see it through. Praise Him for the awesome aspects of His character that shine through this story. Thank Him for letting me achieve the dream He gave me twelve years ago.
Meanwhile, I'll be thanking Him for those same things, and also for all of you who have been so encouraging and inspiring to me. I'll be thanking Him for the wonderful adventure that my writing journey has been so far, and looking forward to following Him through this brand-new chapter that He opened up in my life when one little book popped up and went live online.
I know I've said it before--it seems like I've been saying it a lot lately--but God is good, my friends. That's just all there is to it.

It's Coming...

If you read my last post, you'll remember me talking about how God apparently likes changing all my plans of what I think I'm going to do. And then I said "I plan on doing NaNoWriMo this year". Should've seen that one coming, I guess. More than two-thirds of the way through the month, I've got a grand total of about 3,000 words written. Yeah, NaNo has been thrown out the window. For future reference, in case you were wondering: Don't attempt NaNoWriMo in the month your first novel is scheduled to release.

But that does bring me to a piece of big news: My novel is about to be released! "About to be," as in two days from now!
Well...that's the plan, anyway. And by now I think we should all be catching on to what happens to plans. But if all goes well, Song of the Wren-Falcon should be available for sale either Sunday or Monday, the 23rd or 24th!

Don't worry, I'll let you all know the minute it's live and available. You'll be able to find it here at the Lair, at Splashdown's website, or on Amazon. (And by the way, if you haven't checked out my Amazon Author page, Click Here.)

Since several of you have emailed or otherwise contacted me to ask how I've been doing through all of this, I suppose now is as good a time as any to share an update.
The simple answer is: AWESOME!!!
The more complex answer is: Exhausted, stressed out, panicking, giddy, distracted, sleep-deprived...and loving it.
I know, I know, that doesn't make any sense. But it's the truth. My publisher Grace and I are cramming to get five million last-minute things done for the book and I'm busy arranging book signings and interviews, on top of the normal work that Grace and I both still have to do. It's crazy and overwhelming, but I'm truly enjoying it. This is brand-new territory for me, after all. You only publish your first novel once, you know? And in my humble (though, I will admit, slightly biased) opinion, I don't think I could dream up or ask for anything to make the situation better. Sure, it's stressful. Sure, I don't remember the last time I got eight hours of sleep all together. Sure, I'm still miffed at my mother and best friend for forcing me to read an excerpt of my book aloud at the launch party on the 30th.
But if I'm honest...how many people get an opportunity like this in their lifetimes? What did I ever do to deserve any of this? The answer is "not many" and "nothing".
Everything that's happening right now is a blessing and a gift, completely undeserved, and I don't want to miss or take for granted one tiny bit of it.
The fact is, God is good. Understatement? Yes. There is no word that could even come close to capturing the immense goodness of our King. But at the same time, no. "God is good" is not an understatement. Reality is just that profoundly simple.

So on that note, I'm off to get back into my reality--because we're not out of the woods yet, and a lot still has to happen before the 23rd. Stick around!

Summer is Over...

... or at least, very nearly. It's been an amazing summer, I don't mind telling you. Great weather, plenty of rain (the Ozarks are a rainforest right now, compared to this time last year), exciting events - no complaints!
I won't bore you with the details of my entire summer, but I will take a few moments to talk about Realm Makers, which was definitely the highlighting event!
If you didn't hear about it beforehand, Realm Makers was the first-ever writers conference specifically designed for Christian writers of speculative fiction. And it. Was. Awesome. I met some amazing people, had the privilege of shaking the hands of people I'd previously only met online, and had a great time enjoying the company of a whole troop of people just as crazy and creative and nerdy as me!

We were able to get all three of the Lost Scribes together, which is a rare treat these days. Elyn (far right) rode up to St. Louis with me (second from left) and my friend Michaela (second from right), and Heather (far left) came all the way down from Michigan. In this picture we're hanging out at the Friday night costume dinner with Becky Minor, the reason we even had such a thing as a Realm Makers conference. So a huge thank-you to her for an awesome weekend!

You may have noticed in the first picture a bit of a steampunk theme - at least on the part of Michaela, Elyn, and myself. That wasn't entirely intentional, but it ended up being pretty cool. Pictured here is the pile of weaponry and other steampunk accoutrements we brought along. Michaela made the ray gun herself - yeah, she's cool that way. And for the record: you should have seen the looks she got when she waltzed through Steak & Shake on Saturday still wearing the sabre, ray gun, and bowie knives - with Elyn and me tagging along, acting like this is perfectly normal. We laughed about it for most of the trip home.

Oh, the people we met! In this picture with me is none other than Kathy Tyers! I was so excited to meet her Friday night at the costume dinner/awards banquet (yes, I was there when they announced this year's winner of the Parable Award and the Clive Staples Award, which was awesome), but the coolest part was on Saturday, when I walked down to the lobby to find the Kathy Tyers sitting at a table talking to my mother. Seriously - can it get any cooler than that? (Mom was our chauffeur for the weekend, in case you're wondering why she was there. She said she wasn't going to turn us loose in St. Louis, so apparently she either doesn't trust us, was worried we would be so overloaded with excitement that we couldn't find our way home, or suspected we might just choose not to come back.) So Saturday I got to enjoy a long lunch break with my mom, two of my best friends, and one of my favorite authors.
Among other personages with whom I made acquaintance over the weekend were L.B. Graham, author of The Binding of the Blade series; Brian Davis, author of the Dragons of Starlight series (and with whom I sat down and had a lovely chat about my novel The Sword Masters of St. George's Academy); Jeff Gerke, commander-in-chief of Marcher Lord Press; and of course Becky Minor, author of the Windrider Saga.
Best of all, I got to see Grace Bridges, leading lady of Splashdown Books, again - this time officially as "my publisher"! Yep, she made the trek all the way from New Zealand to be at Realm Makers. I also got to meet a lot of the other Splashdown and Avenir Eclectia authors too - Deborah Cullins-Smith, Kat Heckenbach, Travis Perry, and Robbyn Tolbert. I'll admit, I was a little intimidated about meeting Robbyn. She's the one currently working on Song of the Wren-Falcon, helping me get it ready for publication, and for some reason that just really, really freaked me out. But with the help of my friend Heather ("Help" in this instance indicating Heather dragging Robbyn over to me by the hand, shoving me towards her, and saying "Now talk to each other!"), we broke the ice and started getting to know one another.
Let me just say that, having met and talked to Robbyn, I feel totally at peace entrusting her and all the rest of the Splashdown crew with my manuscript. Don't get me wrong - I wouldn't have submitted my novel to Splashdown at all if I was worried they might mess it up - but still, it's my baby, you know?
Now though, I have every confidence in the world that by the time it's done, Song of the Wren-Falcon is going to be absolutely the best novel that it can possibly be. And it's going to be good for me as a writer, as well as for the novel itself. I'm not going to be allowed to get away with any cheap tricks or short cuts (which, I confess, I did use here and there in SotS - yes, I know it's not SotS anymore but that's way simpler an abbreviation than SotW-F).
But more on that in another post. For now, back to Realm Makers.

So, we three Lost Scribes (say - someone should write a song about that!) were milling around at the costume banquet, and all of a sudden who should we spot but a man with a cybernetic left arm?! Naturally, we had to tell him about our character Skylar, and get a picture with him.

Here we are, being epic - because it's Realm Makers and we can do that. ; ) Later, as the three of us were geeking out about the fact that we'd found Skylar, we realized that Ben Wolf (the cyborg gentleman who graced us with his presence in these pictures) doesn't look at all like Skylar in the face... but he does look a lot like our character Hezekiah in the face. And, were Hez a decent human being in any basic capacity, we decided that we could easily imagine his personality being similar to Mr. Wolf's. So we got to met two of the characters from our shared novel, rolled into one master of writing conference ceremonies/magazine editor.
Which brings me to another highlight of the weekend! On Friday, Ben Wolf and Andrew Winch, the executive and senior editors of Splickety Magazine, respectively, gave a talk on what flash fiction is, and how to write it. (Flash fiction is what Splickety Magazine publishes.)
At the end of the talk, they announced a contest: write a story of 500 or fewer words and turn it in to them by noon on Saturday. The winner would get published in the first edition of Havok, a new imprint of Splickety coming in January.
So, instead of sleeping like we should have done Friday night, Elyn, Michaela, and I all stayed up most of the night, woke up abominably early Saturday morning, and spent most of the time during the morning lectures scribbling stories instead of taking notes. We all got them turned in, and settled down to wait eagerly for the announcement of the winner, set to take place at 5:00 pm.
It finally rolled around, and they started announcing the runners-up. Elyn made the finals, with her story Wolf Myth!
I didn't make the finals, but I was just glad that I would be able to say I entered the flash fiction contest at the first-ever Realm Makers conference.
But then they announced the winner... and it was me!!! I literally almost fell over. I had no expectation whatsoever of winning, so hearing my name blindsided me completely. Which turned out to be a problem, since they then asked me to read my story aloud to the entire assembly of conference attendees. Elyn says I read it a little too fast. I imagine that to mean something along the lines of Twitchy from Hoodwinked. But oh well.
So, that means that if you subscribe to Havok, you can expect to see my story, The Mermaid's Pocketwatch, in the inaugural issue!
It was a great way to wrap up an utterly fantastic weekend. I'm so glad I got to enjoy it with so many of my closest friends, authors I've loved for years, my publisher and new colleagues, and new friends made.
Come to think of it, it made a pretty nice finale to the summer. Here's to next time!

If you've actually made it to this point in the post, you're amazing. I know, it was insanely long. I should have done a three-part series or something.
I still don't have internet at home (another one of those ridiculous details about my summer that I won't bore you with), but I've got things arranged so that I should be able to get to wi-fi at least a couple of time a week now. Most of the posts this fall will probably be scheduled as a result, but I'll try to still reply to comments and post at least every week or so.

I hope everyone's summer was wonderful, and I'm looking forward to this fall. God's doing some cool things, and I'm excited to watch them unfold.

How was your summer?

Life and Writing Updates

No, I haven't died suddenly, or been stranded off-world due to a DHD malfunction, or kidnapped by goblins, or incarcerated by the FBI, CIA, DHS, IRS, ICE, KGB, or any other organization with the capability of making someone vanish for an extended period of time.
Well then, you may ask, where exactly have I been?
Well, for the entire second and third week of May, I was flat on my back with a massive respiratory infection. Not exactly how I wanted to get my spring started off. The last time I was sick for that long at once was when I was six years old and had pneumonia. Thankfully I'm well now. Unfortunately, I passed the joy on to my family, who have been passing it around ever since. (When your family is the size of mine, it takes a while for sicknesses to go through everyone.) We're down to the last two of us, though, so hopefully we're almost done! ; )
And then there was the internet...
We live in what many people refer to as "the sticks", so internet service is difficult to get, but we've been quite happy with the provider we were using. Unfortunately, during my convalescence, the company whose tower our provider used de-programmed our bandwidth, leaving us with no internet whatsoever. We've talked to other providers, but most of them want to chop down trees or dig trenches or charge a king's ransom just to get it out to us, let alone the monthly fees. We've found another wireless provider who can get service to us without any such drastic measures, but they're still building the tower that will be serving our area, and it won't be finished for another few weeks.

So in a nutshell, that's where I've been for the last month. (I know, only a Pursselley would have an explanation that complicated, but it's the truth.)
Then, of course, there were the wiener dogs, and the snow storm, and the tornadoes... yeah, it's been a circus.

If you're interested in an update on my writing, here's the scoop:
Son of the Shield is in the editing phase as we speak! Splashdown Books has a really unique editing system that consists of all the writers in the "family" working together on different projects. Right now, one of the other authors who writes the same genre is going over my manuscript, making corrections and suggestions. Once she's finished the ball will be in my court for a while. I'll be sure to keep you all updated when that happens!
We've already made a few changes right off the bat:

I was thoroughly embarrassed to realize that every time I thought I was using the noun "Prophecy", I was actually using the verb "Prophesy". And in Son of the Shield, that's a word that gets used pretty frequently, so there were a lot of instances of that mistake. *head-desk, head-desk*

We also added in a scene or two with Ryker Verone, one of the secondary characters, to flesh out his subplot a little bit. I certainly didn't mind that! Captain Verone is a fantastic character who I love working with, so any chance to do more with his story is A-okay with me!

We've also added a little bit of shading and layering with the main character so far, but I am not at liberty to disclose the details of that at this time. (Mwa-ha-ha-ha!) Just let me assure you that it's going to make the story even better.

The biggest change we've made so far, though, is to change the story's title. (*pauses to wait for collective gasps to die down*) Yes, I know, you've all been hearing about Son of the Shield this and Son of the Shield that for a long time - some of you for years. Trust me, it's hard for me to get used to, too. But believe me when I say it's for the best.
The truth is, I was about two years into the writing/rewriting/editing process when I realized that the title Son of the Shield didn't really fit closely with the story anymore. It was, after all, the title I had chosen literally on Day 1, the day I first had the idea for the story, and long before I really knew what the story was about. The more it grew, and the more I learned about it, the less SotS really fit. But by that time, the story was two years old and SotS was what I was used to calling it. Plus, the title could work, albeit loosely. So I just left it alone. Honestly, when I first sent it off to Splashdown for consideration, I suspected they might ask me to change the title.
And, sure enough, it was one of the first things Grace suggested after she accepted it. Unfortunately, by that time I had been living with the story for six years, so asking me to change the title was something like asking a mother to re-name her six-year-old child. I had absolutely no idea where to start. So, armed with some suggestions from Grace, I sent a query to all of my friends who have already read the book, asking them for suggestions.
They sent me quite a few, but even staring at a list I drew nothing but blanks. The story simply was SotS in my mind, and I couldn't get past that. In desperation, I sent the list off to Grace, and she made the choice. Ready to hear it?

SotS's new title is:

Song of the Wren-Falcon

Different, I know. Trust me, it doesn't sound weirder to any of you than it does to me. But I'm getting used to it. In fact, I'm even starting to really like it.

Now, that doesn't mean that I don't still draw a blank when someone hears that I'm getting a novel published and asks me what the title is. (My best friend has had to jump into multiple conversations to remember it for me, while I'm standing there blinking, saying "Um...") Really professional, I know. But I'll have the hang of it eventually... I hope.

 

So there's what's happening in my life these days. I don't often have the chance to use public Wi-fi, so I'll probably be pretty quiet for a little bit longer, until I get my internet back at home. But in the meantime, I hope everyone's spring is turning out to be as beautiful and exciting as mine is!

P.S. I'd love to hear what you all think of SotS's new title, so be sure and leave a comment to let me know!