Insurgent finally completed

Dear friends,

It’s taken five years to finish it. But last night, after several rounds of heavy editing, layout and other work, I finally uploaded the files for Insurgent to my printer and to the various ebook sites.

So what’s next?

First, I want readers to know I’m not finished with the series. There will at least a book three, four and five, and possibly more. I know what’s going to happen in three and four, but not beyond that, and I expect to start on book three just after the beginning of the new year. In the meantime I’m working on another book, which is going well, and I expect to have that out by the end of the year.

A couple of notes. First, long time readers know I took forever to finish this book. That had a lot to do with what was going on in my life at the time: I went through unemployment, career changes, several moves. Honestly it was a rough time. So finally, at the end of 2011, I decided I needed to push myself and get it out there, so I broke the story up into episodes so that I could release a serialized version and get something out there.

I won’t be doing that again. Primarily because, in retrospect, I don’t think it was really fair to readers to drop multiple incomplete stories out there. Plus, my editor made a HUGE number of corrections and changes to the final manuscript, which is much better because of her work.

So, on November first, I’ll be taking the 5 serialized episodes of Insurgent off sale, and going forward the complete book will be all that is out there.

If you want to know when Book 3, Fractured, will be out, I’d encourage you to sign up for my mailing list. You can find the sign up form up in the upper right hand corner of every page of the website, as well as at the bottom of the blog posts. I promise not to send out frequent emails, possible one or two every month when I’ve got a new release coming.

Final note. With the release of Insurgent, I’ve updated the cover of Republic. Republic’s done pretty well over the years, but one piece of feedback I’ve always gotten was that while the Purple Heart has tremendous meaning for veterans, most readers who see the cover think something along the lines of “military, war, blah blah.”  And while yes, the book is about the military and war, much more than that, it’s about people, and their relationships, and how we can sometimes go off the deep end. So I tried to put together a cover which represented the most important relationship in the book, that between Murphy and his son. I hope it does a better job representing the story.

Links to the print and ebook editions of Insurgent are here.

If you’ve been waiting for this book for a long time, my apologies for the extra long delay and thank you for your patience! The new covers are below.

Charles