As of this morning, the third book in the Barbarians of the Storm series was finished! The last chapter of the last short story reached its end! This book was a hell of a feat, my toughest challenge yet, but I’ve made it through!
However, before publishing this collection of solid stories, I have to proofread it, as a full body of work and put in the final edits. On its own, it’s not a long process for me. Although, I do have an interesting process when doing the final step in a new book.
You see, I don’t just proofread the file and edit that, I also get a hard copy paperback made and I read through that. Then, I read it a third time in a Kindle-like format. While this may seem crazy and like overkill, I’m pretty paranoid at the editing phase because when I read in different formats, I have a tendency to see other mistakes that need to be corrected. Usually, it’s just minor punctuation errors or something else minute in the formatting. Nonetheless, I want the book to be as perfect as it can be. Especially, since I’m pretty sure I have worsening dyslexia as I get older and older.
Eyes In All Shadows was my biggest challenge because of a few different reasons, but I think I’ll save this topic for an upcoming post. Ultimately, it has to do with the nature and style of anthologies.
As far as this book goes, it’s my favorite that I’ve written thus far. That has a lot to do with these stories leaning more into the horror side of sword & sorcery. However, I love that this book builds off of the mythos created in the first two, and beyond that, it expands and grows that mythos more than the first two books combined.
This is where the universe of the Barbarians of the Storm series really starts to become more defined. Part of that is due to all of the stories taking place before the other books. In fact, four of the six stories serve as origin tales for core characters that readers have already met. With that, it allowed me to expand on these characters and give them more context and meaning to the larger picture. Frankly, they’re characters I have big plans for down the road.
If you’re a fan of cosmic horror and sword & sorcery that veers towards Lovecraft, I am pretty sure that you’ll enjoy the hell out of Eyes In All Shadows. I should state, though, that this isn’t grimdark. My heroes are about optimism, moving forward, and since they’re heroes… being heroic! Also, in this book, there are a lot of badass females… and a few evil ones.
And while it wasn’t intentional when I started writing this, half the short stories center around a female protagonist. My favorite story out of the six is the longest and the final one in the book and it is female-centric as hell.
Keep your eyes open, but once the book drops, I will announce it here and on Twitter.