My second book, Ezekiel Strong, is coming along nicely. I am almost finished writing it and the first part has already gone to the editors. I hope to soon post some excerpts from it to my website. It is an epic story of romance and drama. The hero is a hardboiled private eye / bounty hunter who patterns himself after the greats like Sam Spade. He is a modern hero however with a unique nature that allows him to live both in our world and the underworld of demons, angels, fairies, and vampires. That makes it an other worldly twist on the classic PI novels. I mix elements from mysteries, romance, fantasy, and even a little sci-fi. I am very pleased with it.

I broke one of the cardinal rules of writing. The story is told in first person by Zeke himself and drifts at times from past to present. It is difficult to keep the tense straight, which is why everyone says to not mix them. It was the only way to tell the story and hopefully I was able to pull it off successfully. Zeke is telling the story to the reader in the present while referring to past events. It follows the conventions of a spoken story, just as you would tell someone about past events, mixing present and past tense depending on the current point of view.

The biggest trouble I had was in speaking of characters who still exist at the time of telling the story. For example I would say that “Trixie was mad” but that “Trixie is sexy”. She was mad at the point in the story being relayed but she remains sexy we should presume. I had to go back through and correct myself in many such instances. I see now why writers are warned against trying to mix tense in a story. I think it works well however and gives the feeling that Zeke is telling the story directly to the reader.

My other book, ArchAngelxx, was also first person and had some of the same issues. I don't know why I chose the hard way to tell stories but I just tell them as they demand to be told. In both cases it was important for the hero to tell his own story. The narrative would not have been the same otherwise. I could not see ArchAngelxx being told in third person. I could have perhaps told the story of Ezekiel Strong that way but it would loose the romance of the classic detective novel that I wanted to preserve.

I am a little disappointed with the small number of readers for ArchAngelxx. I am beginning to wonder if the Internet is a good medium for novels. A lot of people have trouble reading for long periods of time on a computer monitor, and the Internet itself tends more towards fast bits of information or entertainment rather than literature. I don't think the net is opposed to storytelling per se, but a different format than the classic novel might be more fitting. A return to serials would, I think, be more fitting.

Ezekiel Strong was originally conceived in such a format. I have written the whole thing in one long narrative without chapter divisions. I had thought to break it up into small bite size units for the net. ArchAngel was done in much the same way, with very short chapters to be read in serial form. It is about the length of an old dime novel divided into 40 small chapters. The trick seems to be in the presentation. People will return week after week for the next chapter in a serial but when it is presented as complete it doesn't have the same effect, even though it is divided the same way.

For Ezekiel Strong I plan to go the more traditional route of submitting it to a brick and mortar publishing house for publication. I have decided to not publish it electronically. I will probably put some excerpts of the web, and perhaps offer an electronic version in the future but not right away. With ArchAngelxx I am thinking of reformatting it and perhaps presenting it as a weekly serial on the website. I have already thought of some more things I could do with it on the net, adding some multimedia aspects. So look for a rewrite soon.

Wonders of the modern infrastructure:

I've had a nightmare with utilities lately. A couple of weeks ago, after a few of days of rain, a large tree fell off the side of a neighbors hill. It took out a power pole which pulled down the next power pole. I lost power and cable service. The power company worked through the night to get the power back on but in the process of putting in two new poles they cut the underground phone lines. I had power back but the internet was gone.

The phone company came the next day and ran a temporary phone line to get our sevice back on. I was back in business. Both of the power poles had transformers on them. One burst leaking oil all over the ground and into the creek. That required a major clean up operation that had heavy equiment working along the creek behind our house for days. It was a long week.

Cable had been knocked out too. Not a big concern, my internet is DSL through the phone company. They finally came around to fix the cable and cut my phone line in several places putting in their new underground line. So now i had cable, but no phones again. The phone company came out and laid a temporary line across my back yard to get me back up and running until they could free up a crew to bury a new service.

The crew finished their clean up around the creek, the utilities got their new mains buried again causing another day without service, and all that was left was my new phone service across the back yard. We had another rain, which wet the temporary line laying across my yard and made internet very sketchy. Then the phone company sent out a crew to bury the new service.

The crew came the day after the rain and it was too wet to dig. I told them to let it dry up over the weekend and come back monday. They showed back up the next day, Good Friday, and said they thought it was dry enough. They got their line in, across the underground power and cable, without messing anything up, so far so good, but then got their tractor stuck in my back yard. They brought in another, larger, tractor and drove all through my neighbors yard getting the first tractor pulled out of the mud. My neighbor wasn't happy.

Finally I had everything working again at the same time. The yard was cleaned up, I must say they did a good job, and the creek was cleaned up. Everything back to normal after several weeks of drama. Then i came home yesturday to equipment down by the creek again. The power company had installed two new poles. One had hit the phone line as I said. Apparantly the other hit the sewer main.

It had taken awhile for the sewer to stop up and when it did they discovered the line was broken. The utility department was digging it up to repair it. First they dug up the main phone line, there went my phones again, then the new cable line. Here we go again.

Over the past few weeks it seems that my internet connection has been down more than up. Of course I have the new book and website out so i have been trying to keep up with that. I am blogging right now from an unsecured wireless network I was able to piggyback on. I guess that is fitting with the ArchAngelxx storyline. I feel like CG hacking into a network to admin ArchAngel from the front seat of his car. I am sitting on a construction site, in my truck, typing away on my laptop.

Hopefully the phone and cable guys will get their lines fixed without tearing anything else up, but i doubt it. One will come run theirs then the other will come and tear it out. I don't know if it will ever all work at the same time. Until they get it fixed I will just be CG, blogging from my front seat at a construction site somewhere in Mooresville, North Carolina.

ArchAngelxx.net

If they control your computer, they control your mind.

"You have a virus on your computer. Its tracking everything you do. If you have a microphone it can hear you. If you have a web cam, they are even watching you. It can not be detected by any anti-virus scan, or blocked by any firewall, they make sure of that. It's not just watching you, it's communicating to you subliminally. Messages from them, flashing on your screen, just beyond your conscious perception. But your sub-conscious sees them: you are being brainwashed." CG

The online version of my novel "Archangel" is up and running. You can read the book, and join the ArchAngel network free. Just visit http://archangelxx.net/ and the complete unabridged text is available online. When you sign up (at a certain point in the story CG, the main character, will ask you to join ArchAngel) make sure you give your correct e-mail address because you can expect an email from CG.

I love the idea of writing a novel online. There is so much you can do that is not possible on paper. The website is written in asp.net so almost anything is possible. I have already thought of ways to make the story even more interactive than it is now, so there may still be some additions coming.

The Mobipocket version is still available for download, if you want to read on your mobile device and Amazon.com has it available on their new Kindle Reader. I can't wait to get hold of a Kindle. That is a revolutionary idea for reading/distributing electronic books.

It's an exciting time to be a writer. There are so many possibilities. I've already started my next novel. I hope you enjoy ArchAngelxx.net. You can give me feedback here.

thanks,

maxwell

ArchAngel released on Mobipocket

At last ArchAngel has been released on Mobipocket eBooks. The MaxwellCynn.com and ArchAngelxx.net websites should be coming online in the next couple of days. They are actually already up, but still under testing. They are presently being hosted on Neolythics.com but they will be moving to their own domains soon.

Go download the preview of the book and check it out, if you like it buy the complete book. The Mobipocket reader is a great little program and free to download and use. There are thousands of titles available for download and you can read them on anything from your computer to a cell phone.

ArchAngel

My new book, ArchAngel, is nearing release. It is currently in the final stages of editing before publication. This is the time when a book is finished and a writer can sit back and relax, enjoying his accomplishment. NOT! This is the time of sitting on the edge of your seat, thinking the book will never come out... It didn't take this long to write it... will it ever come out???

Alright, i'm calm. It will be out soon. I'll post more details as the time gets nearer. The release will be followed by release of an online version, ArchAngellxx. It will be located, where else? http://ArchAngelxx.net No, we didn't pick ArchAngelxx because Archangel was taken. Actually it comes from the story, you'll have to read the book .

I'll post later with some more on the book. Gotta get back to writing the next one. A writers work never ends; thankfully ;)

MaxwellCynn.com

It was a cold, damp, dreary day. The kind where all you want to do is curl up with a good book, in front of a hot fire, and let the world pass you by. Me,I poured a cup of coffee, sat down at my keyboard, cranked up the music, and started typing. I have been typing ever since.

I'm Maxwell Cynn. This is my world. Where light meets darkness and the shadows weave stories of intrigue and romance. Stories of advanced technology and high fantasy. Mystery, romance, honor and adventure. Faeries, demons, robots, and rogues fill the pages here. Their lives, their passions, all revealed for you to enjoy.

My stories are real, sometimes edgy. They are not for the faint of heart or closed mind. They are intended for adults and older teens. Younger readers should seek out the masters like Tolkien, Lewis, Poe, and Twain. The stories here are not pornographic but a certain maturity is assumed in the reader.

So pour yourself a cup of coffee, or hot tea, and come into my world.

Maxwell Cynn