David K. Bennett's Blog

I read a tech article talking about a new thing from Google Labs call Notebook LM. It is a new LLM tool that lets you input your documents and then it summarizes and answers questions based on those documents, PDFs, and YouTube videos, which is cool.

The new feature they’ve added that has blown my mind is that it will generate, totally on it’s own, a very real audio podcast with two AI hosts who discuss whatever you’ve put into it. I was a bit skeptical until I tried it, and then my mind exploded.

Most of you will have read my free Novella Wizard Aspirant (if not, just sign up for the newsletter and you’ll get it sent to you). I loaded it into Notebook LM and the below is podcast it created. It generated the entire script and had it’s AI hosts voice it. I’m blown away. NOTE: if you haven’t read the story there are spoilers.

Just for fun I dumped the entire text of The Apprentice to Zdrell. The podcast summary there isn’t quite as good, but it is still 90% accurate. I also asked it to create some book blurbs of varying lengths and I got these:

In a world dominated by dangerous demon magic, a young apprentice makes a discovery that will change everything.

Jonny is no ordinary apprentice. After being rescued from slavery, he discovers he possesses a rare and powerful gift: the ability to perform Zdrell, a form of magic long thought lost to the world. As Jonny hones his skills under the tutelage of Master Silurian, he faces opposition from jealous journeymen and the ever-present threat of demon wizards who seek to eliminate any trace of Zdrell.

But Jonny’s greatest challenge lies in confronting his destiny. As he masters increasingly powerful spells, including the power of flight [1], he learns the true danger of his abilities. The fate of the world may rest on his young shoulders [1, 2], and he must choose between keeping his powers a secret or risking everything to fight for a world on the brink of war [3].

A young apprentice, rescued from slavery, becomes the last hope against a rising tide of demon magic.

Jonny possesses the lost magic of Zdrell, granting him powers beyond even the greatest wizards. As he trains with Master Silurian, Jonny must master his abilities, including the power of flight, while battling jealous rivals and evading the sinister agents of the demon masters. He soon learns that his magic is more than just a gift—it’s a dangerous secret that could ignite a war and reshape the world.

A young apprentice discovers he alone holds the key to defeating demon magic in this tale of hidden powers and dangerous destiny. Rescued from slavery, Jonny masters the lost magic of Zdrell, learning to control objects, defy gravity, and even fly [1-3]. But as Jonny’s powers grow, he becomes a target, hunted by those who seek to control or destroy the last vestige of Zdrell [4-6].

As you can see, these aren’t half-bad and they’re based on the entire book, something I could never get ChatGPT to do.

This is going change anything to do with learning or summarizing information. https://notebooklm.google.com/?pli=1

Nearly twenty three years ago, I had a story that entered my mind and just wouldn’t let go until I started to write it down. That story was bigger than I ever imagined and grew into a trilogy even before I’d finished the first volume. I’m happy to say that today that trilogy has been completed. The Master of Zdrell released today.

Thank you to all of my patient fans and friends who’ve wanted to get this story finished as much as I did, maybe more. For all of you who pre-ordered, thanks, the pre-orders were nearly four times more than they were for Journeyman and let’s not even talk about the Apprentice pre-orders. If you’re just hearing about this release, feel free to follow the links at the bottom of this post. If you’ve already ordered, the best thing you can do now is to leave a review. I don’t just want five-star reviews. I want honest reviews. I’d love to hear what you think.

For those who listened to the previous volumes, I have to say it may be a while before the audiobook edition is released. I lost my narrator from the previous two volumes, so I have to find a new narrator and producer.

The funny thing about this whole journey is that as soon as I finished with all the publishing tasks and there was nothing more I could do beyond marketing, I started getting ideas for further stories on the planet Klastra, both before and after this trilogy. If you have an area or character that you’d love to see explored, leave a comment or send me an email.

If you have any questions or any ideas, I’d love to hear from.

Thanks for everything

Dave

Order direct from Amazon

Just a quick note to remind everyone that The Master of Zdrell releases on February 15th, 2023. You can pre-order it today on Amazon.

I am hopefully going to be posting much more regularly now. I did promise Master would release in 2022, and I came close. I did finish the first draft and get most of the cover done, but when you have to do everything yourself (or pay for others to help), there’s still some fiddly bits remaining. I just got my editing of the book done. Now, I’m getting it formatted and ready to publish. Lots of little things, but bottom line, I have a tentative release date for February 15, 2023. Once I have things finalized I will get a pre-order up on Amazon. I’ll also be having sales on Apprentice and Journeyman prior to that release.

Now for the big reveal. Here’s my not quite finalized cover design.

More to follow. I’ll keep you posted.

Yeah, I wish I was here to announce a release date, but I’m not quite there. I finished the first draft back in September, and got it out to a couple of alpha readers. Now it is off with my editor and he’s busily churning away on it.

So, the big question is, when will Master finally be ready?

I wanted it to be before the end of the year, but there’s so much left to do after I get the edit back, it will probably be available for you to read in the first few months of 2023. The book clocks in at over 185,000 words, or another 20,000 words than Journeyman.

I still have the cover to finalize, the blurb to write, text to format. There’s lots of things to do to get a book ready for publication. But we are close!

Just a quick note for those wondering about how the writing is going on The Master of Zdrell.

Today I officially surpassed the word count for Journeyman. I still have a lot of work left to do, so it really is looking like Master will clock in at 200K + words. This is a big book, since world wars are big things. This book will have a much different feel from the previous two. This story is told from multiple points of view. With The Apprentice, this was really Jonny’s story, and larger events of the world were mostly in the background. In The Journeyman, the story opened up into the world and the larger conflicts, but it was still mostly about Eril and his growth and struggles.

Now, with The Master, this isn’t just Jonny/Eril/Torin’s story. It is the story of an entire continent dealing with war and conflict, so the storytelling style is different and we get to see a much broader view of the world and people who make it up and how they are affected by this conflict.

It is still Torin’s story, but not his alone. I hope to make it a satisfying conclusion to this journey in the world of Zdrell for all who’ve taken the time to share it.

Hey everyone. Happy 2022. I can say I started the year out right and wrote over 1700 words today, and I may yet write some more. I’ve chronicled already my various difficulties with writing in 2021. In the last two months of 2021 I managed to add a little over 30,000 words to The Master of Zdrell, so I am genuinely making progress. At this point I am committed to getting the book in your hands by the end of 2022. Journeyman released in December of 2019, which seems incredible to me at this point. This is going to be a big book. Apprentice was about 135K words, Journeyman clocked in at 165K, and Master is looking to be close to 200K. In the fantasy genre that is not all that huge. All of the volumes in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time saga were between 225-400K words each. Harry Potter volumes 4+ all clocked in at over 200K, so I’m in good company.

The downside to large word counts is that everything takes longer and costs more. Once I send this off to an editor, it won’t be quick or cheap. But I truly hope that the end result lives up to your expectation.

As promised, I’ll keep you in the loop. If you haven’t already, visit the website, sign up for the newsletter and get a free copy of Wizard Aspirant.

May 2022 be magical for all of you.

David K. Bennett

I have been dreading making this post for some time, which is why I haven’t written it until now. Ever since The Apprentice to Zdrell was released, the number one question from readers was, “when is the next volume coming out?” I delayed releasing Apprentice for years, because I didn’t want people to have to wait years between each volume. I didn’t release it until I had the rough draft for Journeyman done. It still took me over a year from the release of Apprentice to have Journeyman ready to release.

Now that I had two volumes out, I had a real push to get the final book done. The problem was that I had written very little of Master when Journeyman released. Not only that, but while I knew how the series would end, I didn’t have a solid outline of the plot and story all elements necessary to end the series in a satisfying manner. Worse, I knew that Master would be a much more complex and bigger story than those that had preceded it.

Nevertheless, I pushed ahead and in February of 2021 I had a mostly (I thought) completed first draft for Master. I knew that it was still missing some elements, but I felt I needed someone else to look at it and give me a response. I sent it to a friend who is quite literate in the genre and asked him to give me a no-holds-barred critique. He delivered, and I’ve been dealing with aftermath ever since.

To put it bluntly, he told me what I half suspected, but didn’t want to admit. Even though I had written over 120,000 words, the book was missing nearly half of what it needed to be a complete satisfying end to the story I’d set out to tell. He also pointed out several significant plot holes. Even though his feedback was exactly what I’d asked for and needed, it was hard to take. Thinking that you’re nearly done with something and being told that you’re still leagues away from you goal is painful.

Not long after I got this critique, for entirely unrelated reasons, my family and I decided to move out of California. This meant I had even less time to work on writing as my day job and move preparations began to consume all my time. It didn’t help that I was dreading what I needed to do to make Master what it needed to be. I knew I needed to do major structural work on what I had written, re-write much of what was there, as well as write probably in the neighborhood of another 100,000 words of new material. It was daunting, and so I put it off, which was easy to do with all the other things going on in my life.

Still, every now and then, I would get a letter from a reader asking, “when will we see Master?” It was embarrassing, to say the least, when I didn’t have a good answer to the question. To be truthful, I still don’t have a solid answer. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that, in spite of the pain, I’m working on the project again. I have broken apart the material I’ve written and have analyzed it piece by piece. I moved the entire project onto a new writing platform that lets me categorize and manipulate the elements of the story with much greater ease. The writing process on this novel has already been very different than the first two. It is going to be even more different as I now move forward with the re-write and expansion needed to finish this book and the series.

For the month of November (and hopefully beyond) I’ve committed to working on the book six days a week. That work may be updating existing work, or adding new. I don’t know exactly what I’ll do each day, but I’ve committed to do something, including writing posts like this to keep you all informed of my progress, such as it is.

Bottom line, if you were hoping to have a copy of The Master of Zdrell in your hands in 2021, I’m sorry to disappoint, but that isn’t a possibility. I am very hopeful that sometime in 2022, you will have a book you can read, and I’m even more hopeful that the book you read will be genuinely worth the wait.

For the last seven months I was trying very hard to get the first draft of The Master of Zdrell done. The most common comment I’ve gotten from fans is, “when will the next one be done?”

My goal that I worked very hard on was to have the first draft done by the end of February so that I could have the book come out sometime over the summer. I did finish a first draft in February, sort of.

I knew it wasn’t done, but wasn’t sure of exactly how much it lacked, so I sent it off to a good friend who’s opinion I trust and he gave me some fairly brutal, but much needed critique and advice. Bottom line, my first draft isn’t really done, it’s really not even close. I have major structural issues that need to be corrected and I have lots of plot lines that still need to be explored so that the promise of this story can be realized.

I always knew that this volume of the trilogy would be the hardest, partly because in my original vision of the story I knew the ending but the process of getting to that ending was always very hazy. Then there’s just the scope of this book. This is world war. It’s a big story, and it needs a lot more writing than I’ve done yet and I’ve got to fix some major plot holes in what I’ve already done.

My friend suggested I break it into two volumes, but I’m unwilling to go down the Douglas Adams five volume trilogy course, even it is only four in my case. Even with the writing that needs to get done, I don’t think this book will be much over 200k words. In the genre of fantasy, that’s not all that big, but it will take time.

And that’s the bad news. I’m still several months away from getting the first draft done, let alone doing all the editing needed to get it to be the book the story deserves, the story you deserve. So, we may not see the final book until very late 2021 or into 2022. I know that’s not what you all want to hear, but I think it is what needs to happen.

So, what’s the good news, you ask? The good news is that this is going to be a much better book than it otherwise would have been. My writing continues to improve and fixing the issues I have will create a better, more realistic, more satisfying ending to this trilogy. I’m both excited and terrified by all the things I still need to do in this book. I really think it will be worth the wait.

It’s been way too long since I’ve made a blog post, so I’ll try to make up for the wait with some numbers and thoughts.

Progress on Master of Zdrell

I’m fairly certain that those of you who read these posts probably most want to know, when will we get that final volume of the Magic of Zdrell Trilogy? What happens with Master Silurian, Dorull, and Jonny/Eril/Torin (yeah, his master name is Torin) and all the other characters you’ve met along the way? On that front, I have good news and bad news. As noted in my earlier works, I’m not the fastest of writers.

I started The Apprentice in fall of 2000 and didn’t get it published until 2018. I started work on Journeyman in 2007, and it didn’t get published until December of 2019. I started work on Master in 2019, but planned to get the first draft completed by the end of 2020. I didn’t make that goal, but I’m not too far off.

I won’t go into the details, but from September on, this has been a rough year for my writing. My day job has consumed even more of my time and when I finish working on it for twelve hours looking at a screen (that’s what us I.T. guys do) it has been really hard to then spend more hours staring at a screen writing.

Even so, at this point I have written over 90,000 words on Master. I anticipate another 40,000 need to be written, which at my current rate means I hope to have the first draft done around the end of February. This time I’m not going to let the manuscript have months of “resting time” before I start editing, but I’m going jump write into it, so hopefully that will get that done quickly, and then I can deal with the final publishing process.

I’m aiming to get the book out to you by July of 2021. If I can’t make July, it will definitely be before the end of 2021. Sorry it can’t be sooner, but unlike Brandon Sanderson, I don’t have a team of 30 people assisting me and I have a full-time (these days more than full-time) day job, and a family and stuff. So that’s my goal for the book. I I’ve written it here, so I know you all will hold me to it.

Sales and Readership

Most authors/publishers are loathe to release their sales numbers to the general public, unless they are truly awesome. For me, that any of you at all read my stuff is pretty awesome. With the release of Journeyman in December 2019 a lot of folks discovered my writing and the numbers have quite frankly surprised me in a pleasant way. So, here’s some numbers from 2020.

The first two quarters of 2020 saw sales that were more than I’d ever imagined. The second two quarters have seen major declines, but still 2020 was a good year for Zdrell. Ninety plus percent of my sales are e-books, either straight sale or as part of Kindle Unlimited (KU). In general I have two to three times the readership on KU as opposed to those who buy my books directly. Also, since my e-books are only available on Amazon, and I sell very few print and not a ton of audio books, Amazon is where my sales live.

Numbers: For 2020, I sold a total of 1,835 e-book copies and 11 paperbacks across my three titles on sale. I also had 3,667,654 pages read via KU. In April I had 733,704 page reads in KU, so I’m thinking the combination of lock downs giving folks more time to read, as well as the popularity that the books had had prior to that time got me that boost. The Apprentice even had a while where it held the #10 spot in its Kindle book category.

Also, I’ve sold significantly outside the USA. The UK and Australia have taken turns at being top foreign markets, while Canada, Germany, India, and Brazil have all had readers enjoy my work.

I sold just over 120 audiobooks, and that was with The Apprentice being the only widely available volume. I had the audiobook for Journeyman created, but we’ve had technical publishing issues and it will only be widely available in the next month or so.

Bottom line, I’m very grateful for all my readers and everyone who has reviewed any of my books. It is humbling to know that thousands of people have read my work and want me to continue it. The story when it first came to me would not let me rest until I wrote it. It is the support of my fans that gives me the strength to finish it.

Thank you all,

Dave