I am always looking to hear from you. I see my books as a constant improvement project, they get better the more feedback I get. If you’d like to talk about the books or whatever, just click on the “contact” page and fill out the blocks. I do answer reasonable (and some unreasonable) emails. If you don’t want to fill out the stuff on the page, just shoot an email to thevalleyseries2011 at yahoo dot com. I’ll get back with you.

As always, its an honor.

My second book launched in June (The Captain’s Cauldron), it was a good launch by my standards. I had committed to writing a trilogy in the Paul Thompson (The Valley) universe, so unlike after In the Valley I didn’t mess around with planning for the final book, Immolation.

In August of this past year, after attending my first con, I began to lay out an outline for number 3. Then I took a couple of months to think about it, and I started fleshing out my concept for how the chapters were going to tie together. Finally, in December, I sat down and started to seriously write.

I have a bad thing when I start hammering on the keys in a novel. I go into a frenzy and I am consumed by the BOOK until its done. It’s ridiculous. I even wrote a couple thousand words on Christmas Day. But by about the second week of January, the rough draft of Immolation was complete, at about 94k words.

It’s now going through the beta phase, that’ll last until about the end of February. I have a select crew of readers picking over the book’s carcass as we speak. My plan is to have it off to the publisher by the middle of March. It’ll go through another round of slow-roasting there.

I can say with a fair degree of confidence that Immolation will be ready for the general public by June of this year.

And with that, Paul Thompson’s tale will be complete.

Welcome to my new blog, it’s my first foray into the howling wasteland of the blogosphere, so bear with me.

Why am I doing this? Because I finally started to take this whole author thing seriously- it only took three years or so with two books published. You can get them here. I don’t know what my problem was, maybe it was a case of getting over my retirement from the Army, or being unable to take my work seriously.

But after selling a thousand odd books and getting a lot of feedback by some really cool people, I have started to think of myself as a writer. It’s time to commit, as opposed to dabbling.

So here’s a pledge I’ll make, to you the reader. Number one, I’ll post to this website weekly unless some crazy life issue comes up. In that case, I’ll tell you. Number two, I will continue to write, I’ll tell it as I see it. Finally, I will inform my readers of the latest developments with my work, I’ll keep you all in the loop. Only cool kids know about this site, anyway.

What’s with my header picture? It’s not spacey at all. Well, no, it’s not. My books are based in an era where humanity has expanded into the galaxy, but the protagonist is one of the guys who has to get down onto various planets and do the dirty work involved. The picture fits with that theme. The hand you see above is my hand, the machine gun is a PKM, and the black flag was torn from my sleeve. I was gunning in Afghanistan, and the PK was my secondary weapon, my primary was a Mk19.

That picture is a part of my past, and it colors my actions today. So it’s relevant. Also, John Birmingham was gracious enough to feature it on his blog, I was honored that he put it up there.

I have no idea what I’ll write next week, maybe it’ll be some lame picture of my dog, maybe it’ll be some rant about who knows what.

In any case, stay tuned.