Look, I have a problem with blog post titles.
This one’s informational. I have four manuscripts in progress: two finished and edited, though I still tinker, two unfinished. If any of these strike you as interesting, and you wouldn’t mind writing about 500 to 1000 words about what you liked and disliked, send me an e-mail as described below and we’ll see about getting you a copy.
The Skeptic
Most of us can Believe, make their desires and needs appear with but a thought, and while some have stronger Belief than others, everyone now lives in comfort and ease. Well, nearly everyone. Not those who cannot Believe at all, and definitely not those who Believe the wrong things. Maggie is one such Skeptic, and though she has an important job protecting people from Disbelief, she is cut off from much of this world. Yet, she may be the exact person needed when experiments at the company she works for go awry, her best friend goes missing, and her radical friends from college try to recruit her into a conspiracy that could cost her everything.
Progress: Draft is finished and edited. For this book, along with the traditional query options, I’m going to explore self-publishing, so my list right now includes hiring an editor, commissioning a book cover, final layout, and then figuring out where to publish.
How can I read this?: I am always interested in beta readers. Send an e-mail to bryaneikwood@gmail.com or contact me at any of my social media accounts and we can work something out.
The Hand of Sorrow
The people of the fourteenth century know the stories of the goddess Éo of Andevale: as stories, songs, psalms, history or myth. But what really happened hundreds of years ago, when Éo was just “a simple woman with a terrible fate, and one day she woke up and decided to do something about it.”
Having survived a childhood infection that should have killed her, instead transforming half her body into incomprehensibly strong iron and blackweave, Éo decided to use her skill as a warrior to avenge her father’s death. After the retaliation destroyed her hometown, she entered a self-imposed exile, struggling with the use of violence in a violent world, swinging from pacifism to Angel of Death, compelled to act any time someone vulnerable faces an injustice. During her journey, she befriended many people that later became mythologized as disciples and saints: a warrior-merchant couple, a gregarious woman guarded about past, an iron-blooded adversary turned ally. Together they hacked, slashed, and talked through tygers and canyids, pirates, witches, wild-men turned mad by ancient technology, wizards with skewed ethics, and forests of angry trees.
Progress Draft is finished and edited and query letters sent.
How can I read this?: As above, I’m always looking for beta readers. Contact me on socials or e-mail me at bryaneikwood@gmail.com to start that discussion.
The Eye of Fury
The second book in the Éo Ironblood series, about 2 to 3 years later. Éo’s comfortable life that she gained for herself at the end of The Eye of Fury becomes threatened after a seemingly random attack on her family appeared to be targeted to her. In typical Éo stubbornness, she thinks she has to solve the problem by herself, which never works.
Progress: about 20k words in.and I finally got Éo to understand she can’t stick around Tiago anymore.
How can I read this?: Become a beta reader for The Hand of Sorrow and I’ll add you to the list for The Eye of Fury (assuming you provide useful feedback.)
The Gods are All Liars
This book is hard to describe, mostly because I’m about 20K words in but mostly because it’s a compilation work. But here we go: Mary owns a coffee shop, wants to go to art school, and takes care of a bunch of orphan gods at her home. Lieutenant Mololuwa Johnson is a signals analyst on a top secret mission in on the spacefaring Mist Rider, decades in to the Vanderskyl war. Ascetirus the Bloody Armed has been hired to escort two young fools through the Dragonland tundra to D'Ki Amond to seek a secret treasure. And the Gods keep interrupting to tell their side of the story.
Progress: so about 20k words or so, though this is a book I seem to be writing out of order, so there are lot of gaps.
How can I read this?: You can’t, at least not now. This one is quite unfinished.
