And thus it begins...

So, the official first post of the blog.....

For a writer, or rather an aspiring writer, I find myself in the horrid position of not knowing what to say.

Actually let me begin like this:

Back when I first wrote FantastiCon, I used to say "I wrote a book".  My wife, whom I love dearly, would politely correct me.  I had a manuscript.  I had the text of a book, but I could not say I had written a book until someone could go on Amazon.com and buy that book, or walk into a book store and ask them to order a copy of that book.  For her, a true bibliophile, I was among millions of people who sat down, told a story and then let that story sit in some folder or some hard drive and never make it out to the general populous.

But, that's changed.

You can go on Amazon and see, yes, there's a book there for sale and it has, of all things, my name on it.  Right there on the cover image.  Rather impressive, I think.  And thanks to some fledgling word of mouth campaigning, I can even claim to have made money on this book.  Not a lot, but there is a non-zero number on the Amazon reports page under Royalties.  I am a professional writer.  Well a paid writer at any rate.

It's an odd turning point, really, to have hit a point where someone feels that there might be enough to your story that they're willing to trade money for a chance to read it.

And I'm onto my next project.  There's still a great deal to work out with the world building and one advantage of this blog is that I can use it to flesh out ideas, post teasers, and even, on occasion, invite you, dear reader, to provide some feedback.  Is it really believable to have a race of robot women?  Is it beyond even the realm of science fiction to have ships that only can fire broad-sides?  I hope the answers are, respectively, yes, and then no, as both are aspects of this next project.

As to other updates, I sent the files back to CreateSpace last night and hope to order the next proof copy of the book for delivery early next week.  If it passes muster, then in roughly a week a print edition of FantastiCon will be available.

I can't wait....