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

It was strange, the Teachers's instructions. Go into the town, find the man carrying the jar, ask him about a room for the Passover. But, we have learned over the years that Jesus doesn't always like to tell us everything, so we went and did what he asked.

The Passover was strange too. Jesus spoke of His body broken and His blood poured out, all for us. His persistent references to a coming time of suffering are intensifying. He even spoke of His being betrayed, if you could imagine it, by one of us.

There was more, of course, but after he suggested that I would deny him, three times no less, it was hard for me to concentrate on the rest. That He would doubt me after all I've left behind for Him really hurt. I tried to reassure Him that I would be faithful, but His words hung in the air, in my mind and heart, and they hang even heavier now, for I have done exactly what He said I would do.

Three times I stood at a crossroads - acknowledge my Lord and my Savior, or protect myself from guilt by association. Three times I rejected Him, until I was so adamant I didn't know Him that they left me alone.

When the rooster crowed, I could have died right there. I will never hear that sound again without pain. I have failed him, utterly.

And worse, He is in their custody, and I fear that this time, there will be no escape for Him. What are we to do?

Starting tomorrow, I plan to re-post a series of brief reflections on the events of Holy Week from Maundy Thursday to Easter Sunday, written in a fictionalized way from Peter's perspective. These are from a couple of years ago, so if you've been following this blog, you've seen them before. Whether you have or haven't, I hope they encourage you to consider again the events of that week from a fresh perspective.

Or even free.

That's right. You understood me correctly. You can buy "Beyond the Summerland" for just 99 cents!

Here's the deal. My publisher, P&R, has just made the first book of The Binding of the Blade available for Kindle for 99 cents. You can download it from my Amazon page for BTS here.

I realize many of you already own it, and others don't have a Kindle, but we're really hoping you'll get the word out to anyone and everyone you know who does have a Kindle, so they can download it. We want to spread the word about BOTB to the eBook community, and you can help!

And, if you'd like the file for free, it is currently available from my publisher at their website.

Help me introduce Beyond the Summerland to a whole new world of readers. Spread the word!

Well, with the scene I just added to my new book, I've crested the 90,000 word mark, so progress is being made. My best guess is that I'm still on pace for about 140K total for the book, at least in draft form. With some good, thorough editing, I'd imagine that number will shrink. At any rate, it's encouraging to pass another big milestone along the way to completion.

I felt I should also note for those following my progress, that despite my mini-rant from a few days ago about 'all action, all the time' stories (scroll down if you missed it), I'm certainly not 'action-averse.' The scene I just added is all about action, and there's plenty of bloody death. Bones crunch, blood is spilled, and people die - alas!

All that to say, if I gave anyone the impression that by reading Jane Austen of late, my new series would feature heroes like Mr. Knightley and Mr. Darcy instead of heroes like Benjiah, Aljeron and Valzaan, I'm afraid that's not going to happen. My book probably has more in common with "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" than it does with "Pride and Prejudice." (Admittedly, I've not read the Zombiefied version of P&P, but the concept is fairly amusing, I must say.)

So, fear not BOTB fans and action lovers - the plot of the new series holds plenty of opportunities for battles, betrayal and mayhem.

So, I don't often stray from matters of writing or faith, but something happened yesterday that I can't let pass without comment. I have a former student, an '09 graduate of the school where I teach, who was taken 9th overall last year in the MLB draft by the Detroit Tigers. His name is Jacob Turner, picture below.

Well, yesterday, March 10th, he pitched the 4th inning for the Tigers in their spring training game against the defending world champion Yankees. He struck out the first batter he faced, then hit the next guy with a pitch. He went on to walk two more guys, but he didn't give up any runs because he struck out two other batters. The last of those? Yankee first baseman, Mark Teixiera, who went down swinging.

Now I know that there's a certain advantage pitchers have when a batter has never faced them before, so this isn't to say Jacob is the next coming of Bob Gibson. At the same time, Jacob is 18 years old. Last year he was pitching to 15-18 year old high school players, and yesterday he struck out one of the best hitters in major league baseball.

That's pretty cool.

All right, so this has been brewing a while. To explain myself well, I should supply some background.

As my little progress-o-meter in the sidebar shows, I've crested the 60% complete point in the novel I'm working on. What this means, in general, is that several things are coming to a head in the story and the intensity/tension is amping up. In my view, these things are the natural product of laying a good foundation, developing characters and storylines, and allowing things to take their natural course.

At the same time, I'm aware that modern taste in general, and especially in a field like fantasy literature, is way more geared toward what I call, "all action, all the time" type stories. These stories are comprised of a series of predicaments, preferably one every chapter or two, each one more unlikely than the next.

Now, this model can certainly be done well. I haven't read an Alistair Maclean book in a decade or so, but I'm a big fan. As I recall, his espionage books are pretty much constant action until the plot is resolved, and I don't mind that one bit when I'm engrossed in one of his stories.

However, Maclean was a master, and even as a master, I don't want Maclen all the time, because I don't want 'all action, all the time' in every book. I also like stories that take their time to build to a crescendo, not just stories that start at the crescendo and try to maintain it for 300 or 400 pages.

And that's a problem, because I know I'm seriously out of step with the modern marketplace and my own audience. All of which mean that I spend a fair bit of time wondering if a modern audience will come with me on the journey I'm trying to take them on. Will they persevere in my story until the action takes over if they haven't been pushed to an adrenaline high in the first few chapters and then kept there with constant provocation?

To make things worse, I've been reading Jane Austen lately, and while I'm really enjoying it, I keep thinking that I'm slowly killing my fantasy-writing career. Jane didn't write 'all action, all the time' stories at all, and she's not helping me care less about character development and the elements of story not directly involved in intense action sequences. Quite the contrary, she's making me even more resistant to moving that direction.

This could be bad for my writing career.

Now, I know that plenty of talented writers can develop characters well while they spin a good action yarn. And, I also know that less can be more in description and characterization, that these things need not be sacrificed in order to tell a good story with a steady pace.

And, of course, most readers will give you some latitude if you're good enough. My problem might just be that I'm not good enough. I might be the kind of writer who needs the adrenaline kick to be constantly distracting my readers from the fact that I'm not better at this.

Who knows. All I know is that I'm looking forward to writing the last third of my novel, to the action & excitement that it involves, all the while wondering if I'll ever convince a press to buy the thing, and if so, if readers will find sufficient merit in the story to hang with me...

The good news is that even if I don't, I'll always have Jane, and Alistair, to comfort me.

The point of this brief post is to apologize to anyone who tried to access my blog over the last week or so and ran into technical difficulties. The service that hosts my site migrated it to a new platform just over a week ago, and that's where the problems began.

Thankfully, my friend Rob Treskillard - who did the neat graphics on the site and set it up in the first place - was able to fix the problems and now it should be accessible to everyone again.

To any who've been following my little updates on my progress will notice that my graph tracking progress on my new book has inched a little bit forward. I'm about ten pages shy of hitting 60%, and moving steadily onward. I'm beginning to get that happy feeling of having crested the midpoint and moving into the second half of the story, which for me is always enjoyable since that's where much of the work of setting up story lines and characters starts paying off to an ever increasing degree.

Well, I'd hoped to finish the new chapter I started last week on Saturday, but I didn't quite get there. I did finish today, though, so I was almost on target.

The main reason I didn't get there on Saturday was that I discovered as I edited one of the key scenes in the chapter a logical blunder that couldn't be fixed without deleting a chunk of the scene and starting over. It was frustrating and annoying, but this kind of thing sometimes happens. Of course, it is better to catch and address these things early on, at the draft stage, then to have an editor point them out later - or worse, a reader, should such things slip past everyone and make it into the book!

It's not necessary for every reader to believe or 'buy' the rationale for every character's choices and actions, but it is best if those rationales are at least defensible. That 'this person might well act this way even if I wouldn't' is something you hope every reader can agree with on some level. I think the scene I was working on, as rewritten, now carries at least plausibility, which I think it lacked before.

I now have a prologue and 21 chapters of my draft. According to my outline, I have about 20 more chapters to go. You can see from the 'progress bar' on the top right of this page that I've passed the midway point in terms of the number of words/pages I expect to write, so the second half is officially underway. A pace of a chapter a week can have me finished by June. We'll see how that goes...

I promised I'd be more faithful at blogging this year, so here's an update on my post from last week.

I haven't written anything.

But wait, that doesn't mean it's been a useless week. Quite the contrary, I'd say it has been a very good week. While I didn't start a new chapter (and thus, the second half of the book), I did work on a chapter by chapter outline of the rest of the story, and I came up with a few twists that I like and addressed a few structural questions that had been lingering in my mind. So, all in all, I feel pretty good about the week.

Now I know this has been discussed on my site and elsewhere - for those who followed the '08 Fantasy Fiction Tour, you might know it was the subject of some debate - but I'm a fan of structure. With BOTB, I had a chapter by chapter outline to guide me from the outset, even though it changed over the course of the series. For the book I'm working on now, I didn't make a chapter by chapter outline before I began. I launched out with a strong grasp of the central premise and a basic overview of the story as a whole.

I'd say it worked OK, though I might have moved faster in the actual writing if I'd had a clearer idea of where exactly I was going. As I look to finish the book though, I wanted to lay out the rest so I could think through pacing issues and know just where I was going. I feel pretty good about it, and I look forward to getting down to it in February.

First of all, my apologies to the handful of folks who still faithfully check my blog. I was pretty negligent about updating it during '09, and while I didn't exactly make a New Year's resolution to be better at it in 2010, I will try to be.

Secondly, I wanted to update my writing status. After posting just over two years ago in this blog that I'd started a new fantasy book, I wrote about a quarter that novel in fits and starts before putting it away for various reasons. This past September or so, I went back to work on it. By December I was halfway through, and so this January I decided to work back through it from the beginning, mostly editing for continuity since different sections had been written so far apart.

I finished that today, so this week I plan to begin the second half. I'm excited about the prospect, and I hope to be finished by June. "By June" might come to be "sometime in June," but I definitely want to have a finished draft of the whole novel by July 1.

I'm posting this tidbit here, because I want those faithful few who still drop by to keep me honest. I've set up the little 'bar graph' thingy on the side of this page to record my relative progress, and I want to post every week or so about how things are going. If you don't see movement on the bar or new posts, pester me until I either post a new update or feel guilty about having nothing to post and get back to work.

Thanks again to those who've read BOTB and have waited patiently to see more from me. Let's all hope I'll have a finished book and a new contract by the close of 2010.