L.B. Graham — author of the series "The Binding Of The Blade"

2012 is upon us, and I hope that it has started well for you. I also hope that you found time to reflect on God's abundant grace this Christmas season, that amid the exchanging of lesser gifts you took time to remember greatest gift of all.

For me, one of the best gifts of the New Year is the gift of a new start. After wrapping up The Binding of the Blade in 2008 with All My Holy Mountain, I've worked on a variety of projects (chronicled elsewhere on this blog). Now, I have an opportunity to see one of those projects into print, as I've just signed a three book contract with AMG to publish a new fantasy series.

I am excited to be working with AMG, which has become in the last decade one of the few Christian publishers to really commit to supporting the fantasy genre. I first heard of AMG when I was at ICRS in Denver in 2005 to attend the Christy Award Banquet for Beyond the Summerland (which alas, I didn't win) and support the release of The Bringer of Storms. AMG was a few booths down, and Bryan Davis was there signing for one of his books in the Dragons in our Midst series.

In the intervening years, various publishers have dabbled with fantasy, but AMG has really expanded their commitment to the genre, adding several other fantasy writers, notably my good friend Wayne Thomas Batson. It was really through talking to Wayne about his experience with AMG that convinced me it was the right move for me to approach them about my new series.

So here I am, in a New Year, with a new contract, ready to invest in delivering a new series. I don't know if my working title for the series will be its actual title, but I call the series The Wandering. My contract is for three books, as I mentioned above, but I actually envision the story as two trilogies, or six books total. Whether or not The Wandering ends up being one series, comprised of two distinct but related three book arcs, or whether The Wandering ends up being just the first trilogy and the second trilogy gets another name, well, that's a question for another day.

I'm anticipating that the most common question I'll get is 'when will the first book be out?' So, I'll get in first and say I have no idea. The first book is written and I've just sent it to AMG, but these things take some time. I'd guess that it might be out either at Christmas time in 2012, or perhaps Spring of 2013, but that is just a guess.

The first book of the series is the book I've referred to elsewhere on this site as 'TDR.' And, as some of my readers had some fun trying to guess what TDR stood for, I'll just say now that you'll have to come back and read my next post in a week or two, because in that post, I'm going to tell you what TDR stood for...

Well, I've been so negligent about blogging, it's hard to know how to begin. The good news for the few of you who still occasionally check here in the hope of finding an update is that I should have an announcement to make soon. Hopefully very soon, and I know, it has been a long time coming.

I've actually been pretty busy on a variety of fronts, but I expect to return to at least semi-regular posting here, and hopefully some of those readers who have drifted away with my inactivity will return. If you have friends who have at various times enjoyed my books and occasionally visited my site but have stopped dropping by, encourage them to come on back.

Especially with the aforementioned announcement looming in the not-so-far-distant-future...

I was asked in August to consider writing a guest blog for the site, "Speculative Faith." I finally was able to do that this past week and it has now been posted there. Here's the link:

Speculative Faith

Check it out & check out the rest of the site if you've never been there. There's some interesting stuff.

About a month ago I turned 40. I know, to many of you that makes me impossibly old, but its really no great accomplishment - it just means I haven't keeled over and died yet. It also means I'm a step closer to looking like this guy...

Of course, as my beautiful Australian wife is 'some undisclosed number of years' my senior, (ie, if I posted her actual age I wouldn't live to see 41), I never get any sympathy when I hit some milestone birthday and mope around about my age and impending death. It's really quite depressing.

At any rate, I digress. Hitting a pivotal birthday like 40 tends to produce some reflective moments. Looking back ten years, I think about the fact that when I turned 30, I was an unpublished school teacher developing a fantasy idea that I'd had in college. If you'd told me I'd get someone to buy, not just the first book, but all five, and that ten years later the books would be on many different shelves in many different countries, I would have wondered what you were smoking.

As I look ahead, I wonder what the next ten years hold. My brain is an idea factory, and I'm not quite sure where the shut-off valve is. Stories cram into my skull, and I have to write them down to relieve the pressure. Unfortunately, it's easier to conceive an idea than to write a novel, so I'm fighting a losing war.

I wonder what the next ten years hold for the publishing world. Will ebooks and digital publishing revolutionize the industry? Perhaps the better question is how much? Will I look back one day and think, "How quaint that my first series was in paper." Kind of like some classic rock band who made it big with vinyl but now sells most of their music via iTunes.

In the end, I don't know that I care a whole lot. I mean, I like writing and care about the world of writing, but the business side of things is something that I do, only because I have to. What really matters are the stories. They're part of me, and I can't not write them.

Don't get me wrong, there are way more important things in life than writing and being published. I know that. Still it's also true that a big part of my heart and life lives in the space between my fingertips and my keyboard, and that's just how it is.

I'm asked on occasion if I'm working on anything, and if I have any books coming out soon. The answer to those two questions are 'always' and 'no.' I'm always working on something, but with no books currently under contract, there's nothing coming in the near future - though hopefully that'll change before too long.

I have written three novels since All My Holy Mountain was published.

(1) The Crime Novel - I wrote a crime novel first. After spending the better part of six years writing my fantasy series, it was good to write something so different, that stood alone and that could be completed in less than a year. Currently, that novel is on the proverbial 'backburner.'

(2) TDR - I finished this past Fall the book I've alluded to on this blog as 'TDR.' It is intended as the first part of an epic fantasy series. I've recently started shopping this manuscript, and I've already had some really helpful editorial feedback. Consequently, I'll be shortly undertaking a partial rewrite to make an already strong story stronger. Then I'll be getting back to the 'shopping it around' phase.

(3) Classic Re-imagined - The third novel is the classic story, re-imagined, that I mentioned last year. I started it last summer and just finished it, like ten minutes ago. I'm pretty excited about it, but as I'm pretty determined to try to sell it in the general market, I have no idea how that will go.

So there it is, the current state of things. My apologies to fans of The Binding of the Blade. I never intended for such a long break after the conclusion of that series, but life doesn't always play out the way we intend, and sometimes we just have to keep moving ahead in the dark. I hope the wait will soon be over and prove to have been worth it. Thanks for bearing with me.

There's been a fair bit of ice and snow in St. Louis so far this winter. Not as much as in some places, but a fair bit nonetheless.

Looking out the window at the the snow frosted trees and white landscape often brings to mind both the beauty and danger of nature. The snow that makes for idyllic photographs and happy sledding can take down power lines, create hazardous driving conditions and trap unlucky travelers.

Literature has long acknowledged both the beauty and danger of nature. The Romantics tended to idealize the beauty, eulogizing nature in poems often as beautiful as the landscapes they described. Naturalists like Stephen Crane and Jack London, though, portrayed nature less idealistically and more realistically as a force that didn't love men and didn't hate men either - but rather as an indifferent power that would kill you without mercy if you didn't take it seriously.

I've often felt both views of nature were valid in their own right. There's a time and a place to praise the beauty of nature, especially as a indirect way of praising it's maker. There's also a time and place to portray the power and danger of nature, no matter how beautiful it might be.

I also think, from time to time, of how these two aspects of nature are true of far more than just the natural world. There are a lot of things, I think, that are both beautiful and dangerous. We're wise to have eyes to see both when we encounter them, and to be appreciative of beauty in all its forms while also wary of the dangers beauty can mask.

As you may have noticed, the little bar graph on my linkblog that I used from last Fall through this past May to track my progress as I finished "TDR," is now barely registering at all. That's because I've reset it to track the progress of the new novel I'm working on as of now.

I hope to talk this week with my agent about TDR - how to improve it & how ultimately to market it to publishers, but while the slow wheels of the business of publishing turn, I needed to get back to writing - after all, that's what writer's do, right?

I don't have much to say about this book except that I'm excited about it, as I always am when beginning a new project. It's not the next book in the series that TDR is intended to start. It's a stand alone book, and it won't be nearly as long as the 140K word TDR - probably just half as long.

It is, which is a departure for me, a sort of futuristic re-imagining of a classic. Which classic, and how it has been re-imagined - well, that's my secret for now...

OK, here's the deal. One of you suggested in a comment a little while ago that I give you all an acronym by which to refer to the book I just completed. This way, I wouldn't be giving away the working title, which I'm reluctant to do online when the book isn't under contract, and yet at the same time, I'd be giving you something to call it.

So here it is. TDR. If you want to ask about, think about, root for or even pray that my new book finds a publisher, feel free to refer to it as TDR.

And here's a big, really amazing hint - the "T" in TDR stands for "The."

Wow. I know. It's blowing your mind, isn't it?

As many of you know, my fellow fantasy writers and friends, Wayne Thomas Batson and Christopher Hopper have undertaken a two book series together, the first book of which came out last November and was called Curse of the Spider King. Well, the second book, called Venom and Song comes out in July, and Wayne and Christopher are once again doing some pretty cool online promotions. Here's a blurb Wayne sent me about it...

"Teen Fantasy Readers: Would you like to win a private book party with bestselling fantasy authors Wayne Thomas Batson and Christopher Hopper? Would you like to win a sword of your very own? Join the Tribe Building Contest that begins today!"

For details, Visit: www.enterthedoorwithin.blogspot.com

Well, I finished the rough draft of the novel I've been working on today. I started in the Fall of 2008, put it aside after writing about a hundred pages, then picked it back up this school year.

I estimated it would run about 400 of my pages and 140K words. The file I just sent to my agent is 387 pages, but 140,115 words, so I was a little off in the page count, but the word estimate was pretty close.

This book isn't under contract, so I probably won't have news for a while. If you're a fan, though, and you're hoping to see this book & this new fantasy series in print, feel free to pray that the story finds a home. My agent will read it and advise me on any revisions or other steps to take before we shop it, and then we'll see what we'll see.

If there are developments along the way, I'll let you know.