I am happy to announce the release of chapter 1 of Skate the Thief as a preview for the book! Click the button below to open up the pdf.

​I'll leave you with a reminder to go with this small taste: the book will be available for purchase in ebook and paperback formats on June 2, 2020.

Somehow, it is May.

I want to take the space today to talk about long-distance teaching. As a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, all schools in my home state of Arkansas (go hogs!) have been closed for the rest of the schoolyear. However, school isn’t cancelled. The building is closed and is offering no services to anyone, but school is still in session through online learning opportunities. There are some pros and cons to this scenario.

Pros: Students can still receive credit for classes. Teachers get to experiment with non-traditional instructional strategies. Schedules aren’t as rigid and punitive. Students still get to learn. It follows the guidelines for social distancing. Teachers don’t have to take a cut in pay for their contract days being disrupted.
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Cons: This approach necessitates a huge amount of screen time, which kids already receive in excess. Communication with students and their families can become sporadic panic-inducing ordeals. Many students and teachers are unable to commit to a “normal” amount of school engagement because being at home carries more responsibilities than being at school would. Engagement is pretty much voluntary, with no way to enforce it; as such, it is generally quite low.

I still think it’s worth it, but the situation in Arkansas is kind of a bummer. Hey, if you’re looking for something to read this summer, Skate the Thief comes out as an ebook and in paperback on June 2nd. That’s a month from now!

Write your story!
-J. E. Ayers

A lot went on this month. Not just for me, of course, but for all of us; COVID-19 has ravaged the planet, killing thousands in its wake and stranding most of us at home. The world’s a bit darker and more dangerous than it seemed just a few weeks ago. I hope everyone is staying safe and taking all prudent precautions. This post isn’t primarily about The Coronavirus, but it would be impossible to have discussion in the moment without at least acknowledging how weird - and how dangerous - the world’s become for everyone seemingly all at once.
 
However, I do find myself in a position where I can be if some service to people besides just staying home. As an author with his first published book coming out, I’ll be able to offer everyone something novel (I sincerely apologize for the pun) to occupy themselves in June.
 
I’m happy to announce that Skate the Thief, book one of the Rag and Bone Chronicles, is set to come out June 2. In two short (read: eternal, confined) months, the book will be available for purchase in paperback and ebook formats. Here’s a look at the cover art, courtesy of the always talented Nada Orlic. You should check out her other work as well; my publisher made a good choice!

Some publication news, and big personal news: I’ve gone through the first round of edits, and now I’m waiting for the second run-through; and I’m happy to announce the birth of our second child, Hattan! He came a week ahead of schedule, but mother and baby are both happy and healthy.

Nobody is getting any sleep (with the possible exception of our first-born; the happy older brother Aiden is protected from the worst of the nightly noise), so my writing has gotten a little sporadic. Still, plenty of stuff online to be done, and that going well.

This is a short one. More to come next month. So tired.
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Write your story!
-J. E. Ayers

No news yet on the publication front; I’m told it will likely take until March until I get the first round of edits back. I’ve got plenty to fill my time before then. There’s online presence stuff I’ve got to take care of (how does the Instagram work?), “Rainbow” is always sitting there waiting, and of course there’s school.

I almost – almost – started the Wheel of Time series. I had the book in my hand and was getting ready to turn to page one, and I just … couldn’t take the step. I’ve got The Eye of the World.  I own the book. I will read it someday. But not yet. Not yet.

I’m thinking the next series I am going to pick up is Herbert’s Dune. It’s older, less of a commitment, and is about space. It’ll be a nice change of pace from the fantasy I’ve been immersed in for months. I’m pretty sure my local library has a copy, so I’ll check there first. (Support your local library, folks. They are more than depositories for books. Use these spaces!)

One last word here about Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire: there’s a lot of theories out there about a lot of topics in the books, but there’s one theory I feel the need to take a public stance on. The maesters are NOT involved in a comprehensive conspiracy against the Targaryens, but I’m pretty sure some of the leadership could be. A conspiracy of a select few, not an organization-spanning ordeal.

There. I feel like I’ve taken an important stand.
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Write your story!
-J. E. Ayers

Happy new year! I’m happy to announce that Thinklings Books has offered me a contract for my first published novel, Skate the Thief, the first book of the Rag and Bone Chronicles. We’re on a tentative schedule to get the book published by early June of this year. So exciting!

I’ll post more publication news here as I get it. My first step now is … waiting. The editor at the company is scouring my manuscript for imperfections, of which I’m sure there are more than a few. I can hardly believe this is happening, to be honest. I mean, I think my book is pretty good, but I didn’t know if anyone else would be interested in trying to sell it. So, after years of false starts and disappointments, I’m going to be published!

I’ve noticed that the nervous energy isn’t getting in the way anymore. It’s still there, but since I signed the contract, it hasn’t stopped me from writing on “Rainbow” anymore. I would start working on book 2 of the Rag and Bone Chronicles, but I’m not sure what we’ll need to change in book 1 first. With that in mind, I’ll turn toward “Rainbow” in the meantime. Then, it will be several rounds of editing and proofreading for Skate, and then promotions will start. Stay tuned for more updates!

Write your story!
-J. E. Ayers

Hopeful news: a publisher is interested in my book! They responded during the #PitMad event on Twitter to my pitch, and they were happy enough with the sample I sent in that they wanted the entire manuscript. I’ve only gotten this far with a publisher once before with a different manuscript, so this is very promising. I’ll provide updates next month, assuming I’ve got something more to report.

Whenever I’m waiting to hear back from a publisher or an agent, I usually get filled with too much nervous energy to get anything creative done, and I find that to be the case now. Try as I might, I can’t get any more work done on “Rainbow in the Dark.” I keep snapping back to the other manuscript, and I get flummoxed. I find it easier to exercise, though, so at least the energy is useful for something.

I don’t usually get writers’ block; I tend to have enough time between writing sessions to be able to come up with the next steps in the plot and a reason for them to happen. That is one of the nice things about revising and editing; I get to go back and smooth that stuff over and make it look all planned out. Neil Gaiman says later drafts are there to make it look like you knew what you were doing the first time, which is just great all around.

That’s all for me this time. Write your story!
-J. E. Ayers

The #PitMad event is coming up next month. I think I’m going to wait for that to start shopping the manuscript around. If no one bites there, I’ll start sending it off to publishers and agents. Here’s hoping!

I’ve finally finished my re-read of Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. There are entire YouTube channels dedicated to exploring the lore of the setting and speculating on the plot/character developments likely to come in the future novels, especially The Winds of Winter. A Dance with Dragons was published almost a decade ago, and in the 8 years since its release, fans have pored over the pages of the series to hunt for clues and established communities for the discussion of the characters and likely destination of the series as a whole. The sheer amount of content generated by fans in this time is mind-boggling: pages upon pages of text typed out in forums, hours and hours of commentary videos, stunning pieces of fanart – it’s stunning to consider.
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Martin talks about two broad categories of writers: architects and gardeners.  It’s a wonderful analogy, and Martin describes himself as more of a gardener than an architect. I identify with that as well; I can start with a broad overview of what I want the story to look like, but I don’t get any specifics at all before I get to writing. Many times a character will pop into my head, and as I introduce them into the story, I find that I’ve forgotten to name them. Not very architectural of me.

Write your story!
-J. E. Ayers

Alright, I feel pretty comfortable with my manuscript again. I’ll start shopping it around again soon. A few more cleaning sweeps first.

When I was a youngster, my grandfather used to take me out almost every night we stayed with him to a sort of makeshift campsite a couple hundred yards from his home. He’d get a fire going and we’d sit around the flames listening to the sounds of the night and talking. He’d tell stories and talk with my mother about the news of the day while I sat and watched the fire dancing. He usually kept hounds of one sort or another, and we’d hear their braying off in the forest whenever they caught the scent of some critter or another. Of all these memories, the stories feature most prominently.

They would be tales from his past, mostly. Recollections of his time riding the railways with the hobos during the Great Depression, descriptions of his limited childhood education, snippets of conversations with fellow workers in California – the topic changed from night to night, and he often tread over familiar ground. Some of his stories I could recite to you today, nearly word for word, so often did I hear these stories of his. My cousin recorded some of these stories of his, and I’ve got a copy of them somewhere. I’d like to find them and make sure I’ve got a digital version that can’t get scratched. He lived during wild times. People may say the same of us one day, I suppose, but his tales felt … different. Like him, they were from a bygone era, stories that happened in the time they did, and not transferable to any other. I’ll try to find them.
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Write your story!
-J. E. Ayers

“Rainbow in the Dark” has got a whole chapter under its belt, silly thing that it is. I’ll be looking back at the manuscript I plan to shop around before the next blog post.

There’s an adage in writing circles that is always worth remembering: show, don’t tell. It’s an axiom that reminds writers that we shouldn’t use the narrator to just tell everything to the reader. If you want the reader to understand what a character is like, show the reader. Imagine if, when Darth Vader first shows up onscreen, a narration crawl shows up to tell the audience how bad of a dude he is. Totally ineffective! Instead, the movie shows us how nasty he is, from his appearance to his actions. Everything about him reveals how cruel and dangerous he is, and nobody has to tell us that. Characterization should be the same in good novel writing.

Having said that, it’s hard to do. Whenever I’ve got a character in mind, the person is a short list of landmarks. He’s got a bad leg. She’s out for revenge. He can’t make friends and it makes him lonely. She has trust issues. So the challenge for me as a writer is to take these characteristics and turn them into events, which is turn reveal the character for who they are. It’s a complex series of steps, and it takes up a bulk of the creative labor during both the drafting and editing stages. If plot were simply a matter of “Thing A happens, then thing B happens, then …” and so on, anybody could write well without much effort. To make a story good, though, a writer has to work to make his characters feel real. To make characters feel real, you have to show them to be real. Telling won’t cut it.
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Write your story!
-J. E. Ayers