Andres A. Rodriguez's Blog

Alright. King Arthur is now officially available on Amazon.

I really enjoyed writing this book. I feel that it strengthened me as a YA Romance writer, I guess I'll have to wait to see if reviews prove that to be true. However, now that I am back into writing my 2nd book of my trilogy, I can see where my two characters lack in romance.

Now feeling stronger in this genre I should be able to create a stronger romance between my two warriors. This should add in something that wasn't really there in the first book. Although, this is more of my gods Rall and Xena's background mechanics I'm happy that they will feel more destined and complete when they are together.

Unfortunately there is not Arizona book festival so I will hopefully be able to sign books next year.

After writing my first book I felt as though I needed to better educate my writing abilities. I simply wrote a book. That was the easy part. The hard part was knowing my book suffered from my ignorance of not understanding a book format.

How long should chapters be?
How long should a book be?

I found a free writing course on Coursera.com and figured at this point, as passionate as I was about continuing my writing, this could only be beneficial.

The course stared with three book ideas. Another ignorance of mine was knowing OF King Arthur but not actually knowing his story. So, as filler I decided to through that idea into the pot. All I was after was meeting the course curriculum anyway, I had already decided what I was going to write about regardless of my peers thoughts.

Then I received that one message that swayed me in the wrong direction. "The story of King Arthur has already been told. I do not see why you would want to write this or how you could make it interesting."

Immediate I stuck out my E-chest. 'Oh yeah?' I thought. I'll show that guy! 'Challenge accepted!'

After a quick perusing of Wikipedia I set of writing my new novel. I was going to combine the Romeo and Juliet of DiCaprio and Dane's with Disney's 'Sword in the Stone.' Something I thought my wife would even possibly read, a fantasy romance. Why not, she loved 'Twilight.'

Well, I'm happy to announced that the final draft of the novel is now in the hands of my beta readers. I'm sad to announced that it was pointed out to me by one of my readers that 'King Arthur', 'The sword in the stone', 'The lady in the water' are all different fables. I had no idea. As I said earlier, I've only seen Disney's version. I never read 'Le Mort de Artur' or Jack Whyte's Arthurian novel.

I felt as though I might have let the Arthurian fan base down a bit. However, that specific beta reader came back to say they really enjoyed the novel. 'Shrug'... Maybe I didn't let them down and I actually wrote something worth reading. I'm not sure. I do hope to put this out first week of December although, I'm pushing this timeline out because of Covid's interference with some artwork another beta reader is sending me in, which I would like to include in the final publish as a thank you.

As soon as all reads are back, and corrections are made I'll announced the release date. Happy Holidays!