J.H. Powell

25Mar 2021 by dvadmin No Comments

Editing, Editing and More Editing

I'm sitting in a hotel room in Muscle Shoals, AL editing chapter 8 right now. I've turned the first 7 chapters over to my lovely editor-in-wife for her to bleed all over with her red pen. From what I've seen so far, I still seem to be passing her writing course! I start a new job on April 12th and I have that as a hard date to finish this first round of editing and have the book in the hands of a few people to give me some deep feedback. So far I am on track to easily hit that deadline, and I am not going to let anything jeopardize that. In the meantime, I am letting the plot points for the rest of the series stew around in…

16Mar 2021 by dvadmin No Comments

Can it Be?

Architecture, Branding

I'm pretty sure I just wrote the last sentence for Book 1. That doesn't mean it's done by any stretch, since there's still tons of editing to do and I left a few sections with notes to myself to go back and flesh out descriptions later, but overall... this feels really good. Word count right now is around 83500. That'll grow by another couple thousand with editing and some more descriptions here and there. I always intended this book to be an introduction to the series - it's very action packed, throws you right into the middle of the action with the main protagonists, and doesn't slow down. In fact, the entire book takes place over just roughly 21 days. The next book, which is already completely fleshed out in…

08Mar 2021 by dvadmin No Comments

Milestone!

Branding, Decoration

Hit a fun milestone tonight. Finished up the big climatic battle and broke the 80k word barrier. Several loose ends to finish up, a little setup for the next book, then tons of editing ahead of me. A special thanks to my wife, Anita Powell, for letting me bounce all the action writing off of her, even if I did upset her with some of my decisions. It is my hope that I can get others to make such strong connections with these characters that I know and love.

13Feb 2021 by dvadmin No Comments

Excitement (and Sleep!)

Architecture, Branding, Decoration

I had to force myself to stop writing tonight. It's 12:30 AM, and I'm right at the start of the climax of the book - an epic battle sequence that I've been playing over and over in my head for a couple of years. I want and need to do it justice, and trying to plow through it at this time of night when I am tired and my eyes are giving up is not the time to try it. Tomorrow we get to meet with the realtor that is going to sell my late mom's house and the house she sold to me several years back. It will be a gigantic load off of me to get that process started and going. My hope is that tomorrow evening I…

27Nov 2020 by dvadmin No Comments

Good Intentions

Branding, Decoration

Good intentions are very mortal and perishable things. Like very mellow and choice fruit, they are difficult to keep. Charles Simmons Before we dig down into my good intentions and how they ran astray, I wanted to first sort out exactly where the above quote was from. I looked around for a good quote for this blog post and while that one nails it, I'm unable to actually source it. There are several Charles Simmons authors, at least one politician, and a singer - I'm unsure which of those people this quote is attributed to. If anyone knows for sure, I would love to know so I can properly accredit it. I had every intention of using Nanowrimo to make good progress and hopefully finish my book, but it just…