Happy New Year!

Good morning, intrepid readers!

As we all get ready to start the new year, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the last six months and the incredible journey releasing a book has been. First off, thank you all from the bottom of my heart for the support you’ve shown me, both in purchases and word-of-mouth advertising. A good portion of my sales has been readers recommending ‘Forging Glory’ to family members and friends, so keep it up! Each new reader has the potential to tell five new people, and so on, which has really ramped up spreading the book around.

Releasing the book when I did certainly presented some challenges. As some of you may know, I started a new position at Sky Harbor, which entailed two months of training in Oklahoma City. I left home only three weeks after ‘Forging Glory’ released, and I will admit that marketing certainly fell low on my list of priorities. I’m sure none of you were heartbroken when my Insta posts slowed down to nothing, but I’d hate for you all to think I’d abandoned this project entirely. On the contrary, most of my spare time outside of family and work responsibilities has been spent brainstorming and pre-planning for my next book! More on that in a second.

I truly appreciate all the feedback you’ve given me for ‘Forging Glory’, and I’ve already re-released a new version with some spelling and grammatical errors fixed. Additionally, I’m considering creating an “author’s version” of the book, to include a forward and moving some of the family trees to the front of the book. Keeping track of all the different names has certainly presented a challenge for a lot of you, and for good reason! My quest to remove all exposition leaves the readers to create the connections between characters for themselves, which can be daunting for someone not already familiar with these families. I’ve discovered it’s quite difficult to not write from the perspective of someone who studied Roger and his kin for their thesis, haha.

So what’s next for 2025? Those of you who have finished ‘Forging Glory’ know very well that Roger’s story is far from over. My next book will follow him as he carves out an entire section of the Mediterranean for himself, and for his heirs to follow. Along the way we’re going to meet some new characters from history, some of them deserving stories of their own, culminating in an epic story of battle and faith in the Holy Lands during the First Crusade. As a writer, I must admit that I’m interested in exploring other genres as well. I currently run a D&D campaign for some of my close friends, and they’ve all encouraged me to write the story of the characters in novelized form, so I might be giving that a try in the near future.

Thank you for giving me your time and your commitment to ‘Forging Glory’. Keep an eye out for more updates on my socials, and feel free to reach out with any questions or topics you’d like me to address in my next blog. Take care, and happy reading!