ROBUST discussion

To be a crafter is to control the essences of the world. To be a crafter of House Lran is to control the very essence of being, the mind. Feared by others for their ability to read and alter minds, the Lrani are known across the Larangian Empire for both their powers and mental discipline.

Shala, a talented young Lrani scholar, is obsessed with her research and has little concern for the mundane banalities of the outside world. A chance trip to a market rips the woman out of her isolated life after she chooses to use her crafting to stop a massacre. When the eccentric Empress Tua Van orders Shala to investigate the involvement of the mysterious Cult of the Cleansing Gods, the scholar doesn't know if she’s looking into a centuries-old conspiracy or just the paranoid delusions of an unstable woman.

With an unpredictable empress, suspicious palace officials, and strange nightmares all wearing her down, Shala is determined to find the truth before she ends up disgraced or worse.

Now available at Amazon and Smashwords:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Crafter-eb...

SW: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...

It'll be up at the Barnes and Noble and Kobo in a few days (i.e., whenever they get around to processing them) and iBookstore in a few weeks.

Mind Crafter

Congratulations, Jeremy.

Thanks, Andre.

J.A. wrote: "To be a crafter is to control the essences of the world. To be a crafter of House Lran is to control the very essence of being, the mind. Feared by others for their ability to read and alter minds,..."

Oh, I critted part of an earlier draft of this story over at CC. It was set in quite a unique world.
I'll add it to my TBR-pile.

Oh, yet another CCer on Robust (there are like, what 3 or 4 or so of us I think?). Small world! I'm barely on there anymore other than a few private fora, but the last three books (i.e., all my current books) were critted by people from CC. :)

J.A. wrote: "Oh, a CCer on Robust. Small world! I'm barely on there anymore other than a few private fora, but the last three books (i.e., all my current books) were critted by people from CC. :)"

And I'm not the only CCer on Robust here. Yes, I'm not much there anymore, either. I'm more on reading than on writing sites, unfortunately.

Yeah, right after I wrote that I remembered Katie in a few others. I guess I think them more as "Robusters" more than CCers now. Hehe.

Interesting premise Jeremy. All the best!

Thank you.

Congratulations, Jeremy. I was wondering if, with everything else going on around you, you'd get the next book out.

Thanks.

Yeah, this book was originally planned to be like fall of last year.

A year behind is nothing.

J.A. wrote: "Yeah, this book was originally planned to be like fall of last year."

Only a year late? You'll never make writer!

Well, here's hoping to faster releases going forward. :)

After a few more you'll be writing a couple a year and not even noticing that it is an exceptional effort.

Congratulations on your next book.

Matt's getting in early!

Hehe.

Jeremy's still working faster than most of us. I've been working with Andre 17 years and in that time have finished nine novels, though they're each pretty big, and one third of a collaboration. That's about two years a novel.

Yeah, my books thus far have only been about 70-80k.

I just bought your book, Jeremy. I wish I could write books at 70-80K. They have been crossing 100K consistently.

Thanks.

I said that, but then this particular one is 90K. It used to be like 110, but a lot was lost in editing.

I'm not so sure that all those traditional size brackets -- 40-50K for cheap romances, 60K for detection novels, 80k for standard literary novels, 100k and preferably over for "big" thrillers -- have any meaning left in an age of ebooks. Originally those brackets were calculated from the printing costs of books that fit into the pattern of what libraries were accustomed to pay for certain classes of books. In short, even when I became a writer, they were already long outmoded conventions.

That's a good point. I try to tell myself I'm just "writing what the stories" need, but I can't claim I'm not influenced by what I've been "trained" to by those traditional size brackets.

Honestly, a lot of books I read feel padded, and it's not that all long books feel that way to me, as I've read several really long books in recent years that didn't feel padded. Heck, one of Dakota's books I read was, I think, like 150k or so, and it didn't feel overly long at all (and nor did Book 1 in the School of Ages). I've read several 250k+ fantasies that haven't felt padded, but I've read 60 k books that felt padded.*

I'm working on the sequel to The Emerald City (YA contemporary fantasy) right now, and it's probably going to only end up a bit more than 50k, but when I look at the story, it doesn't really feel like it needs anything else, so if I added to it just because its supposed to be "longer", it'd just feel forced.

Conversely, I have an idea for a Heian-Japan era mystery** that will probably hit 200k just because of the complexity of the subplots. So I guess it just needs to be what it needs to be.

*I'm reminded of a particular problem in sci-fi of say the 60s-80s or so, when character subplots and stuff weren't as prominent as they are in more modern sci-fi, in that authors would take basically a short story or novella and try to jump it up to a novel. I'd invariably say, "This probably would have worked better as a novella" and then find out, yeah, it was originally supposed to be.

**Currently delayed because of a severe lack of research time.

Thanks, Jeremy. I do just write until the story comes to a natural end, not counting words. When I first started writing, before Andre took me on, I found detective fiction on which my earlier gurus tried to restrict the length awfully frustrating.

You're welcome.