I just submitted the files for Seven Thunders

I began writing Seven Thunders in October 2012. I finished the first draft in March 2013. And then the attempts to find a publisher began, and then I gave up on that idea earlier this year, since I opted to just publish the Danab Cycle myself.

I submitted hardcover and paperback editions a few minutes ago. For the moment I’m forgoing an ebook edition for this one. I had more than a hundred giveaways for the first book and not one has elicited a response of any kind, and that was more than half a year ago, at this point. Call me pessimistic.

But call me giddy, since this book has been a long, long time coming. I knew I wanted to complete, or at least have made significant progress, in the third book before publishing this one, and as it turns out, I finished that a month ago, so the slate is pretty clear. I wanted to make these books available in rapid succession. The third will follow next February. 

It’s funny, because so much has happened since I first wrote this one. It took many years and not a few shorter works to begin tackling more of the Danab Cycle itself. I am not a fastidious writer. I follow a Douglas Adams model for continuity. But each book is meant to stand in its own, tell a complete story, even though each of these first three books illustrates a succession of events explaining just how complicated the state of human affairs is in this space saga, once the Danab have rediscovered Earth, and dragged us kicking and screaming into galactic affairs…

I kept the same basic formatting as the first book, but opted for a different cover image (this and the next one sports an AI collage). The original idea was to keep cycling through the same image but with different coloring, but a development in the third book made it unadvisable to sustain that image, even though it recurs in the first three books. It would’ve been obsolete by the fourth book one way or another. I also just wanted to bring a more dynamic look to the covers.

Surprisingly, the third book is longer this one, but it’s still one of the longest books I’ll have published to date.

It should go live in a few days. I’ll post here when it does.