Jall Barret

The passengers of the Scampering Pete are on their way to Oshang Daro. If they had more money, they probably would have taken another transit. When the captain of the ship takes ill, five passengers rise to the occasion. Each were looking for a new start and the opportunity presented may be just what they were looking for. Assuming they can survive it!

Death In Transit is now available across ebook stores including Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Everand, Thalia, Smashwords, Vivlio, and Fable.

Meet the crew!

Character	Background
	Jesper Klausen left a backwater world to join the military at a young age. He quickly climbed the ranks but, after time, realized a terrible truth about his service in the military. He spent some time as a mercenary but something about it didn't seem right for him. He's going to Oshang Daro in the hopes of finding a new life!
	Nassadra is a Verushian. Her people have traveled the galaxy for as long as anyone can remember but Verushians are secretive about their culture. After a long mission, she's looking for a change.
	Greis is a Duwgian trader with plenty of space smarts from a life spent traveling in the seediest parts of the galaxy. He's visiting Oshang Daro in the hopes of starting a new business venture. The adventure and opportunities start long before the ship lands!
	Lia Conway was just getting started in her career at a prestigious engineering firm when wanderlust and frustration lead her to take an unscheduled vacation to anywhere in the galaxy.
	Juan Emanuel Rodriguez Galanis's tongue is as sharp as his knives. Unfortunately, his knives are packed away for the journey. He's older than he looks. He's not looking for home. He's trying to stay one step ahead. When things go wrong, he finds himself falling into an awkward harmony with other passengers trying to right the ship.

#VayIdeal #SciFi #Fiction

Last week, I mentioned needing to get my audiobook account and also publishing the book in all the places. Actually publishing the book turned out to be a lot more complicated than I expected. KDP took me two days. I ran into one teensy issue on KWL that took me five minutes to solve. And I'm pretty good at D2D for ebooks at least so I got KWL and D2D done on Wednesday.

Some of the vendors went through quickly. I'm technically waiting on some of the library systems to accept but, as of this moment, the ebook is available in most places where the ebook can be available.

I didn't set a wordcount goal for the week. Which is good because I don't think I wrote anything on The Novel.

I did a teensy bit development work on a book I'm giving the nickname Fallen Angels.

#ProgressUpdate

Image by Anat Zhukoff from Pixabay

I like to watch music theory videos from time to time. Hell, sometimes I just like to watch people who know what they're doing as they do those things even if I have no idea what they're doing. I do use the theory videos, though.

I took piano lessons when I was younger. It involved a fair amount of music theory. I might have carried it on further but I was more interested in composing than I was in playing the kinds of things music lessons tend to focus on.

The kinds of things my teacher taught me in piano lessons didn't really stick because I didn't see how they applied. It's kind of like learning programming from a book without actually sitting down with a compiler (or interpreter) and trying things.

I recently watched a video from Aimee Nolte on why the verse to Yesterday had to be 7 bars long. It's a great video. Aimee noodles around, approaching the topic from different angles and comes to a conclusion of sorts but the journey is more than where you end up. Much like with the song itself.

One thing Aimee mentions in her video is that verses are usually eight bars. Seven is extremely unusual. Perhaps a weakness of my own musical education but it never occurred to me that most verses were eight bars. I compose regularly and I have no idea how many bars my verses usually are.

The members of The Beatles weren't classically trained. A lot of times when you listen to their songs kind of knowing what you're doing but not knowing that, you can wonder, well, “why's there an extra beat in this bar?” Or “why did they do this that way?” Sometimes they did it intentionally even though they “knew better.” Maybe even every time. I'd like to imagine they would have made the same choices even if they had more theory under their belts. Even though it was “wrong.” Doing it right wouldn't have made the songs better.

I'm not here to add to the hagiography of The Beatles. I won't pretend that ignorance is a virtue either. But sometimes you're better off playing with the tools of music, language, or whatever you work with rather than trying to fit all the rules in your head and create something perfect. I tend to use my studies to explore new areas and possibilities. Like my most recent noodle in G dorian.

An attentive listener will notice 'verse' is 6 bars long. I suppose it's possible that songs in ¾ tend to have 6. Another thing I don't know, though. 🙀

#PersonalEssay #Music

I ended up focusing more on my degree than writing this week. I also did a bit of writing on other projects. Progress on The Novel was just about 1500 words.

What I need to get done this coming week is the creation of my audiobook account and the formatting and uploading of the first ebook to KDP, KWL, and D2D.

#ProgressUpdate

October has been a challenging month for me. I have experience doing audio recording — quite a bit — but none of it is recent. Voice acting is also different than narrating books. The total length of book one is also a new challenge. I've never produced a single audio work that was longer than a half hour.

I've learned a lot.

And, of course, I'm nervous too. “What if everyone hates it?” “What if the distributors want changes to the audio files that would require me to re-record the whole thing?” “What if ...” a bunch of other things I don't want to get into.

It's an exciting moment too but, at this exact moment, it's mostly nerve-racking.

Next steps:

• Making accounts with the ebook distributors I'm doing manual releases with
• Making the audiobook distributor accounts

Next month

Best case scenario will see me spending at least two days dealing with creation of the various accounts I need to release book one. Another day for actually publishing the audio and the ebook.

Book two is already written. I'll probably try to get it recorded and produced in November but let's call that a stretch goal.

At the moment, my writing plan for the month is to work on my first full length novel. Not really my first, just the first I'm planning to publish. I started work on it last November and had to cool my heels in March. I've got about 30K written on it and expect to hit 60-70K in total.

That one's going to have a bunch of special stuff in the interior of the ebook and print book too ... assuming I'm up to doing a print book. I also plan to make that an audiobook.

It would be wonderful to have that out by end of December. I don't even have a complete first draft yet. So that's almost certainly not happening. 😹

Stay tuned for previews of my upcoming book series!