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It’s my pleasure to announce the second book in the Bane War Series: Called to Serve. Inspired by Avengers, Final Fantasy, and the Witcher, you’ll follow Ishethra’s and Tariq’s courtship, their daughter Saffa Nightwind (she’s on the cover) and her Institute years. Terrible trials and surprise attacks from Bratgon will lead Ishethra to begin forming her cosmic council of freedom while calling Saffa on a two-year mission to rally support for Nightwind as they prepare for a new Dread War against Bratgon and its endless legions and metal beasts.

Saffa started as a sword swinging battlemage. As I’ve dwelled on her character and how much I liked Yamuba from Trickster Trysting, she’ll get an upgrade with firearms, infusing her magic of fire and ice into the bullets, while still slicing her sword to slay her foes at close range.

I don’t have a release date, but I’m through three chapters (10k words), and I’m aiming for ~150-200k words for this book. Knowing me it’ll go north of 200k 🙂

Get ready for more demons, chaos, carnality, insane fights, and emotional stakes higher than ever.

Early cover proof of concept

Early picture gallery (Ishethra, Tariq, Tenebres, castle courtyard, and your favorite spa).

When I first started the Bane War series, I knew Alonka and Dragan had to have their own story. With the help of Allison, my editor, along with Hannah and Natalia, my beta readers, the book is ready for prime time. Therefore, I’m proud to introduce it as the new first volume in the Bane War series.

Get Trickster Trysting on Amazon! There’s even a full color hardback option (because this book is full of gorgeous pictures, including Dragan wearing his birthday suit) if you have infinite money. Please read the foreword and heed the content / trigger warnings.

Fun fact, Alonka and Puck are inspired by Ukrainian Rapunzel Alena Kravchenko!

Synopsis: Trysting; verb. Meeting lovers in secret.

True love’s fate lies with Dragan, a young barbarian with ADHD raised in a frozen land where demons and humans live peacefully. Stalked by the mavka trickster twins, immortal succubi desperate to find their true love’s soul again, he finds himself tumbling down love’s mountain with lethal consequences looming.

Making matters worse, he’s also next on Yamuba’s abduction list, an inquisitor who could make a reaper’s blood run cold … if she didn’t drink it all first.

From the forbidden wilds to the brutal forging of clan Polumya, to gaining a demon lord as a mother then sailing the high seas to the arena of death, Dragan endures unfathomable trials, finding strength not in his might or magic, but in his mind and heart.

For in the end, true love teeters on his hair-brained idea, one that could damn him. Or worse.

Silver lining? Now I can write exquisite prose about the sensation of injury in real-time because I’m pretty sure my shoulder ligaments are hanging by threads, all cartilage long gone.

Jeff sat at his computer, hesitant to take a selfie with his webcam because he was a middle-aged father who had let himself go a bit. Okay, a lot. His two daughters would be embarrassed, probably his two dogs as well, to say nothing of his wife.

But he lifted his arm, and his sinews stretched at the tear, threatening to unmake his sanity as his shoulder bones did their best to grind his inflamed nerves into dust.

Throbs pulsed like a flaming heart in his shoulder. He held the pose to bask in the agony while clenching his jaw.

After he clicked the take picture button, he lowered his arm, spitting a string of profanity that all in his house heard.

Then he popped ibuprofen, Tylenol, and other medications that shall not be named, in hopes of finding sleep before going to the sports therapist too damn early tomorrow morning to see if he needed surgery or could rehab the offending shoulder.

Either way, he knew this with a surety: he would use Saffa as inspiration and get stronger, to avoid having chronic pain in the second half of his life while finding mental and emotional fortitude.

With Trickster Trysting, Bane War Vol. II in beta reading stage, I wanted to share updates.

First, Fury Feeding got great feedback from a Netgalley promotion I did a few months ago. Readers liked the concept overall, but shared three common concerns:

• Pacing, too slow in parts with too much dialog.
• Confusing. What’s the plot? What is Saffa thinking, what is her goal? Get inside the characters’ heads, please, please, please!
• Writing style. It’s more like a movie script in places. Narrate through the characters, not a play-by-play.

I did a poor job getting the reader inside Saffa’s head, so I’m doing a second edition pass on this book, adding a few scenes I had wanted in the original edition but didn’t have the time/stamina to add. Soren also needs an upgrade–he can still be a shy nerd but also change to his sinister persona, hot as Hells and dark. It will take several months, but I want to get the story right. Once this edition is done, I’ll have Allison, my editor, comb through the book and then get it republished hopefully by end of year.

When I need a break from this, I’ll be working on the third book, Mercy Maiming, starring Zelene. If you haven’t noticed, the background of the website shows Zelene and a potential love interest … who could it be? She’ll be fighting in two wars and playing in a mixed-gender brutal basketball league with no foul calls. Imagine putting the NBA, WNBA, Slamball, and Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball into a blender. What do you get? The CBL, or Combat Basketball League, where losing has more implications than just heartbreak.

And don’t worry. The B plot of Mercy Maiming will continue from the first book as Ishethra leads Nightwind against Bratgon and its horrifying technological evolution, orchestrated by our friend Josnel Soneph. What happens when you combine magic and airplanes? Guess you’ll have to wait and find out. Saffa might become a fighter pilot in this book, but you didn’t hear that from me.

Future looking, book four, Freedom Flaying, stars Demvora and Ishethra. This book will be my first full-on attempt at a proper dark fantasy horror novel as we follow these two mavki as they hunt tyrants mercilessly.

Thanks for visiting and I’d love to hear your comments, like if you’ve read the first book, what you think of it and this series, or anything else random you want to share.

Have you ever gone through, chapter by chapter, and painstakingly added drop caps to your novel? Well, that ends today. I’m originally a software engineer by trade, turned dark fantasy writer, so here’s a little script I made to create all the drop caps for you. This is especially handy if you are using a tool like Scrivener which exports to word, where you then have to do a bunch of post processing. Plus I’ll share some other scripts I made that are super handy.

My drop cap script finds all the “Heading 1” styled paragraphs (chapter titles), then finds the first full justified paragraph and ensures it has a drop cap (if it already has one, it moves on to the next chapter).

For my script to work, ensure you style your Scrivener chapter title output to use “Heading 1” for the chapter names. If you don’t use Scrivener, ensure you are setting all your chapter title text styled as “Heading 1”.

It might sound scary running scripts, but I promise it’s super easy. To run them, you must enable the developer tab on the ribbon. The Developer tab isn’t displayed by default.

On the File tab, go to Options > Customize Ribbon. Then, under Customize the Ribbon and under Main Tabs, select the Developer check box. Save and close the options.

Now you’re all set to run scripts. Go to the new Developer tab on the ribbon, then select Visual Basic. A new window appears. Click Insert -> Modules, then paste in all the code from here:

https://gist.github.com/jjxtra/5065efe8a0c0def823512afab77fd2e3

Once you do that, back in Word on the Developer tab, click macros, then double click the script to run. Some might take a few seconds or up to a minute, so be patient.

The scripts I use everytime are RemoveFirstBlankLineEachPage (fixes Scrivener adding a blank line at the start of each chapter), ChangeFootnoteNumbersTo10Point (thanks Scrivener for outputting such ginormous footnote numbers), AdjustImagesWithPaddingAndWrapping (my novels have lots of pictures and this makes square images alternate left and right while making other images appear in front of text, all while ensuring padding), and lastly ApplyDropCapToChapters. If you aren’t using Scrivener, you only care about the ApplyDropCapToChapters function.

I use these scripts to format Bane War books when I export from Scrivener to Microsoft Word. By the way, you should always choose RTF format for the output, load that in Word, then export to a docx, without compatibility mode.

Hope this saves you a bunch of time. It sure has for me. I can export from Scrivener for a 210k word novel, run these scripts, due a quick formatting pass and be done in less than fifteen minutes.

On February, 24th, 2022, russia invaded Ukraine without provocation. But too often people forget, russia annexed Crimea in February-March of 2014. Russia’s war against Ukraine has lasted ten years, with no signs of ending. Daily, they murder civilians and kidnap children.

Why?

Putin would have you believe it’s to have a buffer zone against NATO, or to denazify Ukraine. But russia itself acts as the Nazis of old, stealing Ukrainian children and indocrinating them to their culture.

When you peel the veil of propaganda away, it’s clear russia wants Ukraine’s land and vast resources. Vladamir Putin has mad dreams of being like Peter the Great, who also loved his brutal wars. Putin is nothing more than a thug, a broken old man who has ruined millions of lives. He and his associates will pay the price.

Notice the small scrollbar on Wikipedia’s entry for russia war crimes in Ukraine. Those are just the officially documented ones.

As for Bane War, this series takes place on Yava and other realms. Ukraine’s colors and symbols appear in each book. Three pillars define my series.

Badass heroines. I hate stereotypes and how women have historically been treated. So I’ve thrown all this away for my series. If you want “traditional” roles for women and men, please look elsewhere.

Freedom. These women, the badass heroines, have partners who fight at their sides against impossible odds against the tyrannical forces of “light.”

Deception. Propaganda is a running theme. How blatant, outlandish lies can be accepted, or at least instill apathy and confusion.

Bane War has adult themes and visceral descriptions of love and war. If you’re looking for flawed, chaotic individuals who bamboozle order, you’ll find yourself at home.

If the books can provide inspiration and entertainment, maybe even educate about propaganda, then I’ve accomplished something worthwhile.

Thanks for visiting. May freedom’s wing carry you.

Browse Bane War Books on Amazon.

Amazon charges a whopping 0.15 USD per megabyte delivered (converted from British pounds in Amazon’s example). When I first read this, I thought it meant gigabyte, but no … it’s megabyte. Imagine having to pay 15 cents everytime you downloaded a small photo. Sound unreasonable? I agree.

What does it actually cost Amazon to deliver these precious megabytes for ebooks? One need only look at the cost of Amazon S3, their cloud storage service, to see the true cost and why this is 9000% overpriced.

First, we examine the storage cost. According to Amazon, it’s $0.023 per GB per month stored. Converting to megabytes, we get $0.000023 per MB per month stored. Essentially free for an ebook that’s several MB big.

With storage eliminated as a cost factor, now let’s look at transfer costs for S3. Just making a request costs money, apparently, and it’s $0.005 per 1000 requests. Converting this to a single ebook request, we get $0.000005 to initiate a request to download an ebook. Again, essentially free.

How about for the bandwidth used? Amazon shows $0.09 per GB downloaded. Converting to megabytes, we get $0.00009 per MB downloaded. Now observe the absurdity of the delivery charges for a 3 MB ebook.

Cost to download 3 MB ebook from kindle: $0.15 * 3 MB = $0.45

True cost to Amazon for delivering the ebook: $0.00009 * 3 MB = $0.00027. Essentially free.

Imagine trying to sell an image heavy ebook on Kindle. Impossible.

But wait! Amazon has the 35% royalty option without delivery fees, you might say. Yes, this is true, technically, but a 35% royalty is hilariously low. And that 70% tier? It’s more like 40-50% when you factor in the delivery fees. I’m shocked this hasn’t come up in an anti-trust government case. Amazon’s clause forbidding selling books at a lower price on other platforms at least has, though it doesn’t extend to the delivery fees.

In summary, this is what happens when monopolies grow unchecked. They can charge whatevery they want and extract every drop of money from their users (content creators and customers alike) because they can. Capitalism at its finest. Now you know why Jeff Bezos is so filthy rich.

What does Jeff Bezos do with such funds? A picture is worth one thousand words.

I spent an entire day fiddling with images, positioning them pixel perfect and finally got fed up, so I made a tool to do it.

With this tool, you can take your cover’s back, spine, and front image and put them into my program. It will output five images that you can stack into layers.

Visit the Book Cover Creator github repo to learn more.

I’ve put together a bunch of VBA macros for Microsoft Word that work around numerous longstanding bugs in Scrivener, or other common scenarios, like removing two or more spaces between sentences, trimming paragraphs, that sort of thing.

I hope it saves you as much time as it has saved me.

Scrivener VBA macros to save you time

Kate Vishnyakova has crafted a beautiful masterpiece, lifting my writing with her creative skill.