Welcome, new folks!

Hi, there. If you've joined the mailing list recently, I want to make sure you get your free Frosthelm book, Traitors Unseen. If you haven't gotten it, you can get it free here (the site will ask you to sign up for this newsletter, which you're already getting) or here from Smashwords. It's also on Apple Books, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble. Please, enjoy with my compliments.

Flames Over Frosthelm is free until Aug. 5!

I'm excited to share that I'm running a free giveaway for Flames Over Frosthelm until August 5th. If you go to Amazon now, you can get a copy of my very first novel, the one that started all of this. It's the tale of two young investigators in a medieval-ish city who stumble upon a much bigger mystery than the jewel thief they're pursuing.

This novel sets up the Inquisitors' Guild series, which includes three other books, each a complete mystery and story, each with a different member (or members!) of the Guild as the narrator. I've intentionally written these as a series of stand-alone mysteries so you don't have to remember a bunch of stuff from book to book. Some of the characters come around again, but the focus is always on new people and new voices.

I hope you'll enjoy a copy on me. Dive into the magic, mystery, swordplay, scheming nobles, silly jokes, and normal people trying to do right against long odds. (Note: the link to the book above is an affiliate link for me).

Writing progress

I've been at work on another sci-fi novel in the same general timeline as Kenai and Daros - i.e. my future setting where humanity has reached the stars and colonized many worlds, but a great war has destroyed most of them. The few worlds left on the fringes have joined up and started to rebuild humanity.

Daros centers on a surprise alien invasion of a minor mining world and the people (and aliens) who get caught up in those dramatic events.

Kenai follows a disgraced former space marine who ends up working security at a remote archeological dig. She ends up needing her military training to survive a violent betrayal and to start to discover what makes Kenai such an unusual world.

This new book (as yet unnamed) is actually mostly (so far) set on a ship in the Patrol, the naval fleet tasked with protecting human worlds and keeping the peace. The central character is a low-ranking engineer. The ship she's serving on, the Outrider, is on a risky mission to investigate the worlds that have been cut off - those destroyed in the war, from which nothing has been heard in over 350 years. Her ship, modified to allow long faster-than-light jumps, is on a long-range, long-term mission, cut off from the rest of humanity while they see what the war left behind. Not everything is as it should be on the ship, and mysterious schemes and sabotage come to light.

I'm about a quarter of the way through the first draft and having a great time. Like most of my books, I don't have any idea what's going to happen next - I tend to discover the plot and characters as I write the first draft, and then I revise and connect everything when I do my rewrites. That means I'm discovering the story at the same time the characters are, which is really fun.

Milestones

The late June/early July giveaway promotion for my mystery What Grows From the Dead is still bearing fruit as more readers discover the book. I broke 400 reviews on Amazon today for the book, which is more than any of my others, even my first one from 2019. That's particularly wild because it had around 40 when the promotion began on June 27th. I still have 5-6 people reading it per day even a month after the promo, which is terrific (and great fun watching reviews roll in).

Even more free books!

I've also joined a group promotion that runs August 2-4 organized by a couple of book festivals (NBCC in Atlanta and BWE in Chicago) that are happening this month. There are free and discounted books of all genres: romance, thrillers, mystery, sci-fi, paranormal, fantasy, and more. Many (but not all) of them are by authors of color.

They've got a bunch of promo images for the group event, so I chose the silliest one:

Check out that big list here.

I'm part of several author collectives, and we share each other's work to try to help all of us reach more readers. In many cases, the books we share are are free or discounted. Sometimes, they ask that you sign up for a newsletter like this one. Here's a book I have to share this month: 8:17 by N. Cooper.

This sci-fi thriller is set in Australia, where a bunch of people suddenly begin acting strangely. This wouldn't be so bad, except that some of them, strangers acting in eerie coordination, are after nuclear fuel rods.

Thanks

Thanks for being part of my mailing list! I hope you are having a great year, and I look forward to sharing a new sci fi book with you (probably towards December or early next year). In the meantime, grab a copy of Flames Over Frosthelm for free and enjoy!

May the Bloodmother watch over you - 

Dave