Well, after sifting through my recent archives, I can't figure out whether or not I've posted this before. If I have, I'm sorry, if not, enjoy! You may recall a few days earlier when I mentioned what I was working on. For anyone who cares, I present the opening five pages or so of The First Candle:

So it occurs to me that I haven’t been writing much about how to write lately, which given that that is supposed to be the entire focus of the blog, I feel I have let all roughly 5 people who read this blog down. Actually the number is probably a lot lower than five, seriously, my counter should be in negative numbers.

You can’t always control what you write, sometimes you don’t want to.

History, as I have often pointed out, can be a great template for your writing. Take the life and times of that young go-getter Tutankhamun, who by the age of 9 had already become Lord of all Creation. How many nine-year-olds do you know who make the sun rise? Not many, I bet.

This excerpt comes from the opening of Katherine the Average, a short story which takes place around a century and a half before the events of the Course Books, and concerns some of Jason Bur’I’s ancestors. Just a few generations back, unlike some other stories. This particular story has already been published in the book GavelGavel!!! by the Camarillo Writer’s Club.

An oldy, but a goody, this is a complete short story out of The Path to Ascension. This is a good example of re-purposing work, I had originally written this story for a school assignment, using characters and events from Mike Webber's The Apocalypse Troll. After putting so much work into it and coming up with such an original idea, I decided it wouldn’t take much to swap in my own characters and events. Thus, the story you see here is based entirely on my own intellectual property.

Today’s topic: honoring your dead.

So I’d like to begin by saying that its very difficult to find recent pictures of Vladimir Lenin, but he looks really good for a guy who died in 1924. All right, so why am I talking about 87-year-dead communist mummies? Well…

Another small sample from The Concourse to Victory, this time the first few pages of Forbidden. Parts of this story were actually written while still working on The Path to Ascension, thus giveing it one of the longest production times in the series.

This is a small exerpt from The Concourse to Victory, available now:

Today I am going to share an exerpt from my as-yet-untitled manuscript that has been in progress for years now. Feel lucky, I don't typically share things I'm not finished with or haven't published yet:

Map making.

So a probably vaguely important part of any major fantasy undertaking is the map. This also a ridiculously difficult part, so lets talk about it a bit.

Today will be a day long remembered. Like the moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, this is going to be one of those days we’ll smile when we tell our grandchildren about. May 1^st, 2011: Osama Bin Laden is DEAD!