The Sky's the Limit

For the past two days, I read the final copy of "The World Breaker: Limited First Edition" from cover to cover... not as an author, not as an editor, but finally for entertainment.  I suppose this was the sixth or seventh time I had read the story, but my first time reading it in the final form.  Thank goodness it is so good.

I began writing "The World Breaker" in December of 2010.  In April of 2011 I had finished the story and began the editing process with a team of literary assistants.  Although we decided on the July 1st deadline, I quickly realized that we would be pushing it to have the book available in time.  After all, some people take years to write a novel... this would be less than seven months.  Still, time is valuable and every day a missed opportunity, so I went about working as hard and as dilligently as I could to finish on time.  The book was all in my head, it was just a matter of getting it on paper.  At one point, Joe Ellis and I were up until 2 AM working to make a deadline.  Writing the book truly became my second, full-time job.

So it is with great satisfaction that I have come to the conclusion of that work.  It's not conclusion in that I'll never write again... actually I'll start on the sequel in full force a week into July.  It's that there is a finished product sitting behind me right now.  It's great.  My goal originally had been to write something that was Best Seller worthy, even if it didn't sell ten copies.  Well, right now we've made that goal - the book is an amazing story, 110,000 words long, about a man who has nearly lost everything in his life and his reclamation of who he is as he works for a company about to change the world through a new virtual reality system.  It's deep, it's fun, it has tons of action, it has romance... it's a tour de force.  Don't believe me?  Buy it and see.  I can say all these things now because I have finally read it in its final form, and I am proud of it.  It takes a lot for me to be proud of something.

I now have some idea of what I want to do.  With the huge potential of this book to sell well if we market it in the right ways and get it in the right hands, I want to be an author.  I am an author I suppose.  But I want to finish this series, as well as write another series that is in my head.  Hopefully they'll be successful and I can use them as a springboard to do other things and use my creativity in all the ways I've had stored up in my noggin.  If they don't sell tremendously... well, I can say that I've written a book.  And it's a book I'm very proud to have my name adorning.

And that'll do just fine for me, even though the sky's the limit.