Blog — Page 2

DAWNBREAKER Is Out!

August 7, 2015 by Jay 10 Comments

Celebratory Giveaway! (Free Books for Someone!)

July 15, 2015 by Jay 1 Comment

So as you may or may not be aware, I have a NEW BOOK COMING OUT in only ABOUT THREE WEEKS (AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!).

(FYI, that AAAHH was the sound you make when you are screaming in a sort of half-excited, half-terrified kind of way, not the one you make when you are sighing contentedly after enjoying a refreshing beverage.)

The book Dawnbreaker is the final installment in my Legends of the Duskwalker trilogy and to celebrate the moment, I wanted to do a special thing.

If you’re already tired of reading, here, click this link and go win some books!

Back in 2013 when my first novel Three was published, I joined two other excellent authors who were also making their fiction debut at Angry Robot Books; Ramez Naam and Wesley Chu.

I don’t know exactly how to tell you guys this but uhh … two out of three of us are kind of big deals.

Both Ramez and Wes were nominated in 2013 for the prestigious John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and Wes went on to earn the nomination again in 2014.

And now here we all are in 2015, and all three of us have finished the trilogies we started. Of course, I’m the last to put mine on the shelves (on August 4th! buy buy buy!), so to celebrate I thought it’d be fun to give away not one, not two, but THREE trilogies!

I’ve got a contest set up running until July 29th wherein if you can properly answer the very challenging entry question (hint: the answer is my name. extra hint: my name is Jay Posey. double extra hint: it’s the third answer in the drop down menu) and are lucky enough, you can win NINE WHOLE BOOKS (six of which are by Campbell Nominated Authors!)

Click right here to enter the contest!

You’ll have to enter an email address to enter the giveaway, but don’t worry I won’t use it for anything nefarious. (Not any time soon anyway. I mean, definitely not this week or anything.)

If you do decide to enter, make sure you watch for an email from (automated) me so you can click on the link in there to CONFIRM your entry. I’m trying to make sure only real-life people can win so I don’t end up having to ship these great books off to some email-generating robot who has set up shop in international waters. Not that I have anything against robots. I LOVE ROBOTS!

Also also, if you sign up, you’ll get a SPECIAL LINK that you can share with other people you think might be interested in some awesome books. For every person that signs up via your SPECIAL LINK, you’ll earn another five entries, so you totally aren’t ruining your own chances by telling other people about this.

Okay wow that’s a lot of information! Thanks for reading all of that! Now go win some books!

New Book Cover and news and stuff!

July 4, 2015 by Jay 8 Comments

So the cover for my next book Dawnbreaker has been Officially Revealed, and it looks a little something like this:

Dawnbreaker Cover — Book Three of Three!

Dawnbreaker is the final book in the Duskwalker trilogy and it’ll be on shelves August 4, 2015 in the US, and 6 August worldwide. But if you want to go ahead and pre-order it from Barnes & Noble or Amazon or anywhere else you prefer to shop, I wholeheartedly invite you to do so!

I’m really proud of this book and the way it brought everything together for the whole series, and I hope all you readers find it as emotionally satisfying as I did. Also, it has a LOT of words.

To celebrate the completion of the trilogy, I’m going to do something a little different and special for this book release. I’m still putting the final touches on it and getting the details sorted out, but stay tuned for an announcement soooooon!

Yay books!

About Working with Awesome People

April 1, 2015 by Jay Leave a Comment

In various places around the ol’ interwebs I have made the habit of saying I like doing awesome things with awesome people. By which I mean, as much as possible, I like getting around people who are doing cool things and finding ways to team up with them.

Three1985 - Cropped

Which is pretty much just the way I put a PR spin on the fact that I like to ride the coattails of people who are way smarter and more talented than me. It’s kind of like finding a really wealthy person and convincing them to throw all their money in a pile with yours, and then each taking half.

One of the great benefits of this Clever Ploy is that sometimes Awesome People go off and do something Awesome on their own, but include you in it anyway. Here, for your enjoyment, is such an example:

Angry Robot Books Archive

April Fool’s Day or not, I’m totally going to pretend that blurb is genuine.

Awesome people are awesome.

Today’s word is awesome.

Some News! Audiobooks and new books and awards oh my!

March 5, 2015 by Jay 5 Comments

Sorry to get your hopes up, I didn’t actually win any awards. Yet!

But as promised, in order of appearance in the title:

1) AUDIOBOOK! – My second novel Morningside Fall is finally available as an audiobook, narrated by the masterful Luke Daniels! You can find it right here at Audible!

2) New Books! – I’m very happy to Officially Announce that I’ve signed up for two more books with Angry Robot! One of them is probably no surprise, as it’s the third book in the Duskwalker trilogy, titled Dawnbreaker, and will be out August 2015.

Mildly surprising, perhaps, is Outriders, a new military sci-fi novel that will be coming out in 2016. I’m very excited about exploring a new world and can’t wait to see what you think of it unless you hate it in which case don’t tell me!

You can read the official announcement at Angry Robot’s site.

3) Awards! – as I already spoiled, I haven’t won any BUT I am eligible for a few, if you are nominating people and feel like I’m deserving of such. Even if you don’t feel I’m deserving, I will still happily accept your nomination! My novel Morningside Fall is eligible for the Hugo for Best Novel and so forth.

I’m also in my second (and final) year of eligibility for the esteemed John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, which I would love to be nominated for because there are some REALLY AMAZING authors eligible for it and it’d be nice to think I was among them, purely for selfish reasons.

But don’t feel obligated to nominate me for awards, as I also gladly accept cash gifts instead!

How to Work is Part of the Work

February 2, 2015 by Jay Leave a Comment

So my pal Kameron Hurley has an excellent post up about how she hacked her writing process which you should totally go read because it’s excellent insight into how she works and more importantly why she works that way. Kameron is the author of the God’s War trilogy and also The Mirror Empire which blew up the epic fantasy scene last year and you should totally buy all the copies of all her books.

One thing in particular that struck me while I was reading her post was just how incredibly different creative processes can be. In her post, Kameron talks about why writing in 90 minute chunks wasn’t working for her and why she’s decided to go against the Typical Wisdom of Writing Every Day.

It was particularly striking to me because as I’ve been working on the third book in the Duskwalker trilogy, I had to re-evaluate and reinvent my own process. Writing Morningside Fall was extremely difficult for me, and I think in some ways I broke myself finishing that book. (I’ll probably talk more about that one of these days, when I get past my current deadline.)

Suffice to say, I was struggling mightily with this latest work until I tried a new thing: fifteen minute sprints, twice a day, once in the morning, once in the afternoon. You might think fifteen minutes isn’t enough time to do much of anything. That’s certainly what I thought for a long time … until I tried it.

And it’s true, I don’t get HUGE CRUSHING WORD COUNTS in those fifteen minutes. Sometimes I get maybe up to 300 or so, which isn’t a bad pace. But what’s more important is what happens when I sit down at night (after a full day at the Ol’ Day Job, and a couple of hours of Family Time, when I’m tired and grumpy and still have to open my laptop to do Moar Work).

Which is, I write a bunch more words. Like, a lot more. I’m way more productive now than I’ve been in previous months, and maybe even ever. I’m still not exactly sure why this particular change helped get me moving again. I just know that for the first time in a loooong time, I’m actually enjoying writing again, and I guess success tends to beget success (where in this case success is defined as hitting word count goals).

If you went and read Kameron’s post, you’ll see why it struck me so much. If you didn’t, well I’ll spoil it for you; her basis for taking a single long day of writing stands pretty much diametrically opposed to my fifteen minute sprints. CLEARLY WE CAN’T BOTH BE RIGHT.

Except, we can, and we are. Because we’re two different creative professionals, each professionally creating. And, perhaps most significantly, we’re both interested in figuring out how we each create best.

All of which is to say, if you’re a writer and you’re still trying to figure out How to Do the Work, don’t worry if your process doesn’t look anything like anyone else’s process.

It cannot be stressed enough. Everyone Is Different. Part of the work of being a professional writer is figuring out How to Work. It’s certainly helpful to have access to other writers to see what works for them and what doesn’t, but it’s important to recognize that what works for them might not work for you. In fact, trying to replicate someone else’s creative process might actually be worse for you.

If you want to be a serious creative professional, you have to be serious at evaluating yourself, and you have to be brave enough to make the necessary changes to improve. The process that worked on Book X might not work on Book Y. You have to be willing to tear down what used to work and replace it with what works now.

There are many stories floating around out there about how Tiger Woods has, over the course of his career, broken down everything about his swing and rebuilt it from scratch multiple times. As creative professionals, we need to approach our work with the same seriousness and the same devotion to excellence.

Learning how other folks Do Their Work is great for opening up possibilities, but ultimately it’s up to each creative to get down in the mud with their own process to figure out how they work. How to Work is part of The Work.

Apparently the word for today is work.

Mmm, work.