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And we are now at the end of Sand and Blood[1]. For those who have read it, thank you. It has been a very long journey for me, mostly filled with self-doubt as I tried to write a story that I wanted to see on the page.
The entire novel has now been made public on the website and I consider it fully a Creative Commons[2] BY-NC-SA licensed novel. When I first decided to publish it under Broken Typewriter Press[3], I remember sitting in the living room as I struggled with two versions of the legal page: one that had All Rights Reserved and the other which had the Creative Commons license. It was important to me, mainly because I believe in the gift societies, It took me hours of staring at the two before I went with the All Rights Reserved. I felt like a coward when I did, but I figured when the book went into the black, I would switch it over.
2: https://creativecommons.org/
3: https://broken.typewriter.press/
I ended up jumping the gun on that when I decided to make Sand and Ash open. That was the result of weeks of introspection and discussions. Of course, if I was smarter, I would have started with Sand and Blood, which is the first book of the series instead of the second, but… that's life. Now, I can resolve one of those problems.
The other one was that Flight of the Scions[4] wasn't the first one. That will never be resolvable but I'll just have to make that novel even more fantastic.
4: https://fedran.com/flight-of-the-scions/
One of the things that pushed me to accept Creative Commons was Cory Doctrow[5] and a panel he did at ICON some years ago. The link has a summary of what he said.
5: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/about/
For me — for pretty much every writer — the big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity (thanks to Tim O’Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy.
After the first dozen readers' feedback, I suspect that Rutejìmo's story would be a difficult sell because of my obscurity, the complexity of the world, and the atypical protagonist.
I still feel passionately for the story but I decided to use this series as a lead for Flight of the Scions, which I think will fit a more classical fantasy YA adventure (and maybe get more people to get caught in my little fantasy world).
It is also a tie-in for the patrons[6] that lets everyone read the novel now and, if they like it, help me with the next one. Sand and Bone[7] is almost ready to go out the door, I just have a few final steps before it will be done. It just requires that pesky “money” thing and I'm pretty open about where I am with these things.
6: https://fedran.com/patrons/
7: https://fedran.com/sand-and-bone/
I'm planning on serializing Sand and Bone starting as soon as I finish talking about Flight of the Scions in my weekly posts. That will give me a little bit of time to handle some outstanding things and start on my other obligations.
I never wrote the scenes between this chapter and the previous one, but I consider them important to be ultimately important for Rutejìmo's evolution but not dramatic or significant for the reader. I strongly believe it takes time to evolve as a character. Years actually, but this chapter is only a hint of the man that Rutejìmo will become in Sand and Ash[8].
8: https://fedran.com/sand-and-ash/
This is an epilogue, it ties up the biggest question left over from the novel. No real revelations or cliffhangers. Actually, I really hate novels that end in cliffhangers and I won't do that to readers. When you get to the end of the novel, it should be the end of a novel not a teaser for the next one.
Read Sand and Blood 30: One Year Later at https://fedran.com/sand-and-blood/chapter-30/[9].
9: https://fedran.com/sand-and-blood/chapter-30/
My submission for the Hath No Fury[10] call is almost done. I've sent it through the writing group and integrated their feedback. I think it is a pretty solid story, but contains a ton of spoilers for Sand and Bone.
10: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmmartin/hath-no-fury-an-anthology-where-women-take-the-lea
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