Well, it’s been an adventurous month, but it takes more than a malfunctioning eyeball and a collapsed lung to stop me, which means that Draft #4 of The Wizard’s Way is DONE!
Our next step is to see what our beta readers have to say, apply their advice in the next round of edits, and then drop this bad boy – okay, bad but well-intentioned; Chaucey is complicated – on September 1st!
Who’s Chaucey, you ask? Read on to find out—and then to get your first official look at the cover art!
J. Chaucey Thatcher has a monster inside him, but this is the least of his worries.
A murderer prowls the Iron City, slaying inventors. An angry mob storms close behind, blaming wizards. Any they find, they burn alive.
Chaucey is an inventor. He is also secretly a wizard, and the only person who can help with this secret was just murdered before his very eyes.
But when it comes to investigating, Chaucey is as dogged as his best friend is dog. With the help of his loyal pug butler, his sparky (almost? maybe?) girlfriend, and a sleuth of rambunctious bears, he has vowed to unravel the mystery of these murders and save the city from the grips of terror.
But the monster inside him burns for escape.
Will he save the Iron City? Or will the monster destroy it first?
And now, drum roll please…
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…
…
Though really, forget drum rolls. Let’s bring out the whole band for our illustrator, Mandy O’Brien (aka Painted-Bees on DeviantArt, Tumblr, and Twitter).
I’d been following her art for years on Deviant Art (I mean LOOK AT THIS), so when I started pondering illustrators for a colorful fantasy adventure with two civilizations of talking animals, I didn’t have to ponder long. Her vibrant style combined with the animated quality of her art meshed perfectly with the world I’d pictured in the novel, and looking at these illustrations is like looking at characters that walked right out of my brain onto a computer screen!
Read about them this Fall!
Monsters. Murder. Swashbuckling Pug Butlers.
Coming September 2016.
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