Elevated Chapter 19 is posted on SOL.

Last week, I needed to get some sleep and posted chapter 18 of Elevated at 10 PM on Thursday instead of after midnight on Friday as I have been and, for some reason, it got a ton of reads - more than twice as many as other new chapters have been in previous weeks.

I don't know if the timing was relevant, but I'm perfectly happy to repeat the inadvertent experiment by posting chapter 19 now. It's up and live. I hope you enjoy it.

100,000!

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Elevated Chapter 18 is posted

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I wonder what I was thinking

Combing through the files in my hopper, I came across a number of unstoried titles - story stubs that are nothing but a title and maybe a couple of notes jotted down or an opening paragraph. Some of them I have no idea even what I meant to write and some are really quite evocative. Here are my ten favorite (in no particular order):

A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

Attractive Nuisance

Care and Feeding of the Wild Party Girl

Frenemy Mine

Hypotenuse Screamed

Love on the Installment Plan

Our Sins Like Ghosts

Shade-Tree Fixing Man

They Move Slowly in Winter

Nor Custom Stale

Maybe I'll take some time this weekend to play with a few of them.

Abandonment Issues

The French poet Paul Valery famously said, "a poem is never finished, only abandoned." It's equally true of prose, I think. I put the finishing touches on Chapter 21 of Elevated tonight and shared it with my first readers and editor. Already I have a list of over 100 changes I want to make to the story before I release it as an eBook on Amazon. But for now, it's done. I'll fix whatever typos my sharp-eyed editor Mandrake LXIX catches between now and then, but the story is what it is. The last chapter should be available on or before February 14, 2014.

I hope it's a satisfying ending for all of you. Corvus, his friends, enemies, lovers, family, and slaves will be back in the next novel, which no longer has even a tentative title.

I'm going to take this week to decide what I'm writing next. Some possibilities include The Paphian Way (the origin of Lucretia Octavius/Tullius/Gallicus,) a series of short stories called The Truthspeaker and the Oracle set in the first century of New Rome including one called Saturnalia in Rio which is told from the perspective of Caesar Mauritius shortly after landfall in the New World.

There are other possibilities not from New Rome as well. I may need a break from exploring that world every week before I plunge back in. Watch this space for details.

Elevated Chapter 17 is posted

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Elevated Chapter 20 is off to my first readers.

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