Joseph Mitchell's Blog

A huge mega-interview featuring seven authors who write about the end of the world, myself included. I really like doing these kinds of interviews, and reading about other authors who write the sort of books I love.

Click the link below to see it. Good stuff!
Post-Apocapalooza!

Yesterday, I went to the movies and saw Tron Legacy, the sequel I've been waiting 28 years to see. The original movie changed my life and inspired me to learn computer modeling and animation. As practice, one of my earliest animation projects was to recreate the scene with the light cycles from the original film, using my computer and models I'd created from still images. Years later, I used my computer modeling skills to create the cover of my novel, Shard Mountain, so in a way I have Tron to thank for that, for giving me the desire to learn computer modeling and animation. It saved me from having to hire an artist, anyhow, and I think it came out well.

I loved the new Tron movie. The sequence with the light cycles is so beautifully rendered, I'm almost at a loss to describe how happy and giddy it made me feel, being such a big fan of the first film. It's actually getting some bad reviews from critics, but if I recall correctly, they said the same things about the original. I really enjoyed it very much.

I wrote nearly 2,000 words on the first night of NaNoWriMo, then a conspiracy of mishaps had me spending the next few days rebuilding several computers, including my writing PC. It's all better now, and my new writing PC is better than the old one. The new one is whisper quiet, where I'm more used to my computers sounding like vacuum cleaners with the fan noise they emit. So it's a week later and I'm behind in my NaNoWriMo writing, but I'm catching up. Three more weeks to go!

NaNoWriMo, the yearly event where thousands of people attempt to write a novel-length manuscript during the month of November, begins in two hours. I'm really looking forward to doing it again this year.

It's been four months since Shard Mountain was published, and I'm very happy that so many people have enjoyed the book, and that more people continue to discover it every day. I've been working on a sequel, the first of several planned, but I don't think I'll be releasing another within the next year. Shard Mountain is very special to me, and I don't want to rush through anything. If Shard Mountain is my Star Wars, I want to make sure that the next book will be my Empire Strikes Back or Wrath of Khan, as opposed to a Grease2, which I thought was okay, but not even close to the goodness of the original movie. A sequel to Shard Mountain is coming, but I need to take my time to do it right.

I recently did an interview about my first novel, Shard Mountain, for David Wisehart's Kindle Author Blog. I liked that he asked me specific questions about the book, and look forward to doing more interviews like this one.

You can read the interview here:
Kindle Author Interview - Joseph Mitchell