Yes, Hansell's Hope is now available. I had the original artwork a year ago, but had trouble making a decent wrap around cover. But my friend Sarah Thomas has really done an excellent job of taking Lilian Barac's original artwork and adding that extra professional touch. It's beautiful!

Hansell's Hope is the sequel to Hansell's Dragon (whose cover could use a Sarah makeover). The story of Collin Hansell and Jake the mammal dragon continues. New challenges arise as the village finds out about Jake and then the director of the prison planet desires to make changes that will affect Collin and Jake very profoundly.

I hope to put my books out much quicker now. Next will be another contemporary romance, a companion novel to Pastor's Promise, with an overlapping time frame and some of the same characters. This one will be Angels & Bettas.

Then, my plan is to put out a third science fiction book set on the Planet, Austin's Playground — Hansell's Apprentices — which will have three short (50,000 word) novels, one of which takes place during the same time period as the last half of Hansell's Dragon. The other two stories would follow after Hansell's Hope. That will be out, Lord willing, by next spring.

So now I await my first copies with anticipation.

Thank you, all of you who've read my novels and encouraged me to keep putting them out. It makes a difference to know you have enjoyed the stories so far and are waiting for more. The more I hear from you, the less likely I am to give up in defeat if I come to a difficult obstacle, such as learning InDesign or CSS html programing or learning Adobe PhotoShop. Okay, I still haven't learned PhotoShop, but even if I had, I doubt seriously that I could have come up with a cover as great as Sarah's.

So . . . Enjoy Hansell's Hope and let me know what you think.

Posted on Sunday 09 of September, 2007 [23:21:38 UTC]

Well, my very first blog. Makes one kind of nervous. I have no great words of wisdom, so I guess I'll talk about the novels. The sequel to Hansell's Dragon is finished. It is formatted. The cover art was finished months ago. But there's always something keeping me from putting it up. First I needed the artwork. Got that back in August or September. Then I was writing a prequel — Yes, the first draft of The Escaped Experiment was written last September. This is a story of Collin Hansell's early years. I started a sequel to that, but had to stop for the holidays. That sequel I just finished and it doesn't really have a name yet, and I'm worried it wanders too much. But that's just distracting from Hansell's Hope, which I'm hoping you are all waiting for.

I did get Adobe Creative Suite for Christmas, and I've been learning to use it. That used up several months of procrastination. So now I have it formatted. I'm just now doing a re-edit. Ack! More tiny errors. Will it ever be perfect? Not likely. So . . . I need to re-edit the book, create the cover page and wrap around cover (which may be hard because I haven't even opened photoshop yet, just indesign), and then load it all up here. — Oh, and make the web pages for the site and STOP PROCRASTINATING.

Well, let's end and see what my very first blog post looks like.

Posted on Wednesday 25 of April, 2007 [17:18:57 UTC]