Wow... Just... Wow.

First Chosen (Tears of Rage) is now available at the Kindle store.  It actually went live Saturday afternoon right before my middle show at the Valhalla Renaissance Faire.  I'd like to thank everyone in the audience for the massive applause I received when I made the announcement.  I held off spamming my social networking sites for two reason: 1) I wanted to see if sales would generate without a whole lot of news, and 2) I wanted to make sure the formatting came out correctly.  Response:  1) It did sell some copies without a huge announcement. 2) The eBook version did have some formatting hiccups, but I think I've resolved those.

So, now I've got this novel up on Kindle.  I wrote the first words of the book on my Thirtieth birthday.  The original first line isn't even in the book any more.  Hell, the story doesn't even start in the same place.  So many things have changed over the past nine years as I've gotten to know Julianna, Faelin, Grandfather Shadow, and all the rest much, much better.

Working on this small bit of TEARS OF RAGE has really taught me a lot about writing and about myself and where I want to go with the 2nd half of my life.  Before now, even with the publications of Knight of the Living Dead and The Dragon Bone Flute, the whole "writer" thing was still sort of hazy.  Now with the book going live - the book I've been writing for the last ten years, and had bouncing around in my head since I was twenty-four/twenty-five - it's a little different.  When I put the other stories up, I could sum up my thoughts about them with, I hope these do well, and I got excited with each sale and had fun dreaming about the day where Steve Moore (author of KotLD) and I can afford to eat once the royalties start coming in.  With TEARS, I find myself wanting it to do well.  No, wanting is the wrong term - needing might be more applicable, but it doesn't really work either.

I want to be a writer now, more than anything.  Looking at my book on my own Kindle, moments after it went live, and being able to show it off to people at Valhalla was such a rush.  I was so proud of myself, and not in a pompous, arrogant kind of way, but more in the goofy, look-what-I-did kind of proud of myself kids get when showing off an art project or the 100% on the surprise quiz in math class to their parents.  I'm back to that place where I was in jr high and high school, where I was working on my "novels" instead of doing my schoolwork.  I did that a lot.  For me, public education was a quiet place to read and work on my writing.  I still have some of that writing, and it looks like the writing of someone who didn't pay a lot of attention to his California public education classes, but the seeds of storytelling are there.  In the last twenty to twenty-five years I've refined my craft.  It's not perfect, but it's getting there; which is a good thing, as this is really what I want to do for a living.

It's been a strange journey to this point, going through fits and spurts of no writing to blasts of frantic production.  I've had a few people along with me for a most of that journey, and to them, I say, "Thanks for being patient with me."  To those of you who are just starting with me, congratulations, you stepped onto the path just as it's getting exciting.  Here's hoping it just gets better and better.