Hi All!

I hope you are doing well. The air continues to be hot, humid, and mimosa-scented here in my neck of the woods. Well, I like the smell of mimosas, so that’s nice. It’s that time of the year when I have to go drag my cats inside every night because they’d really rather be outside hunting like the little creatures of the night that they are.

I have been working rather slowly on finishing the audiobook of The City of Shadows. Audiobooks take a while to make, and since I’m a DIY-er, they take even longer. The good news is that everything you get from me is a lovingly handcrafted artisanal product. The bad news is that this means it can take a while to get new books out there. But I *am* kicking around some ideas for new stories, so there will be some…someday.

But in the meantime, I need to finish the audiobook for The City of Shadows. Narrating my own audiobooks is a great way to get a feel for the characters and develop “voice,” in both the literal and figurative senses of the word. It’s surprisingly physically exhausting, and ridiculously slow–it takes somewhere between two and ten hours to create one hour of finished audio, not counting the original writing and editing–but it’s a way to get really close to your work.

If you’d like to get a free preview of the first hour of The City of Shadows, you can pick it up here. If you don’t already know, Bookfunnel has an app for listening to MP3s distributed through their site, so that’s an easy way to listen to it. Ignore the bit at the beginning and end about the book being for sale–the ebook is, but the audiobook probably won’t hit the stores for another week at least.

And if you’re thirsting for more books, check out LitRing’s Freedom to Read book event. There are dozens of books in lots of different genres, all free on multiple retailers, and there’s a contest you can enter for a chance to win a Kindle Fire.

And if you’re looking for yet more free fantasy, the July Permafree Fantasy giveaway still has a few more days to it:

Happy reading, everyone!
E.P.