Please listen to this new update in shiny audio – yes, that’s my voice!
Right on… that time again! The final pause before the race to the outside with the garden boxes, the bees, the vineyard, and more. February is such a strange time here: a month of anticipation before the unstoppable burst of Spring strikes out from the earth, the sky, and the trees: they all speak at the same time, and you can hear them in a deafening way when the air finally warms up.
But not yet. Now we still have cold old Mister Winter to entertain.
Let’s race out of the cooler months with some uncharacteristically balmy music:
Frontliner today is George Howard – Jazz Fusion has an exceptional energy to it that fires off a secret vein of neurons in the brain, one that evolved simply to notice and enjoy the sound of Jazz Fusion when it occurs: there is truly nothing else is like it.
Now, let’s get cookin’.
Website Migration, HO!
We are now very close to opening up the new kellinkston.com. It will be stupidly feature-rich with a whole lot of love put in and surprises for those willing to go the extra mile and take a good look around.
Here’s a tease of one of the pages from the build version:
It’s still in the works, but we’re coming very close to the finish line from half a year ago when we started this whole thing. Turns out building a website right takes a lot of time!
Featured art of the month: “ACE” card asset by Franibear (for a certain game project)
A planned minigame in Letter out of Order – check out this neat High Overlord crawling his way out of a playing card! Wow, don’t hurt me! Look forward to more game updates super super slowly over the next year or so.
I have a legit company now… about time!
This one’s been a long time coming.
I’ve needed a legal backdrop for the expanding universe of the books that goes beyond a “hey I can prove I published this first” ism.
Creative content is more valuable than ever – in fact there’s argument to be made that it will be the most valuable thing a human being can have in the future in an age where machines will do almost everything else. We wouldn’t want anything sneaking in and grappling our rights away to our stories and any royalties they might generate, would we?
I don’t do this for the money, obviously – but it goes without saying that if I can pull off doing this full-time, then I can spend even more time doing this, and the pace at which I complete the bigger broader story will increase greatly. It’s been several years since the last entry in the Rondian Legacy books, and I’m raring to get back to them with Azure Vigil, as well as other series I’ve been running nice and slow like Nocturna League and Courts Divided.
Anyway, in an age where scams and stealing creative things is hitting an unprecedented high, and seeing the need to expand the legal boundary of the “business” into more forms of media (game projects, for example) I’ve decided to finally incorporate into a legitimate business.
Yes, this does include the full nine yards of an operating agreement, financial accounts, mailing address, phone number, trademark applications, and much more. it’s truly the entire package. I should be covered on all fronts to really push out aggressively without much concern for the prying fingers of neer-do-wells.
SPACE GATE LLC will be the primary imprint of all my works in the foreseeable future to include ebooks, novels, audiobooks, games, and any other kind of multi/mixed media releases. The only exception to this is prior publishing agreements with other houses, for instance Butterdragons with the Xtreme Force series, (as well as a neat secret project we’re cooking up.)
SPACE GATE is probably a familiar term to most of you: the means by which almost everyone in The Verses get around – interconnected dimensional gates that lead one above and beyond their reality to another place with new people and rules… sights and sounds – a comprehensively different lived experience waiting for you, if you simply are willing to step forward and enter.
It represents the connective tissue that stories serve between the worlds of other people: a clever reminder that one cannot traverse the distance to new realities without first making the commitment to “enter a gate” as it were.
Look forward to greater and greater things, my dearest reader. Thank you for being so patient with me; it’s no exaggeration that there’s been quite a lot to sort through, but I am cutting through the jungle and heading up the hill to meet you.
The passing of time confounds all but the most prepared, and what I’ve realized more and more through the years is that the key to being prepared isn’t merely will, but a will to understand, organize, and plan forward. One gains the future that they design, and the more nuanced a conversation you can have with yourself about what brings you to that future, the more accurate your landing point when you actually arrive at this so-called “future.”
I feel like I’m at a place where the work will be more than ever for a while, but these will be necessary growing pains to get to where I want with the Grand Audacious Plot and kick things into high-gear.
Plans for the year:
With the above in mind, let’s see how much of the following I can accomplish this year:
-Audio editions for every currently published novel series I have out, narrated by yours truly (this excludes Xforce due to publisher stuff, and Voidstar due to the series needing a much more intensive brush up).
-Print editions for every currently published novel series I have out. (Same exemptions as above apply to this one.)
-At least three new short story collections with audio and print editions included. (Just wait for these. I have a lot to show for them, but I’m keeping them tight under wraps until it’s time.)
-The new website up, functioning, and twittering like the charming little bird I know it can be.
-A playable build of the first hour of Letter out of Order.
Just like last month, I’m looking forward to an action-packed year filled with tons of work. I’ll be refining a ton of projects while also attempting to breach new and exciting frontiers along with one of the most challenging projects I’ve ever taken on.
Now, for the parting of the month…
As always, you can reach me via email at kell@kellinkston.com. Fire me a pigeon and give me your best wishes as I work to get everything up to their permanent, best shapes. It’s been years since I’ve touched a lot of these projects, and while I’ve jumped from one to another learning all I could as fast as I could, I think this is the year I put my foot down and say that it’s time to make them as good as I intended them to be, and them permanently move on.
Stay tuned in the facebook group for new stuff and cool announcements. If you were lucky enough to get a holiday postcard and some stickers, hope you enjoy them. If you didn’t get any just wait for Early November and I’ll get the next batch of mailings ready.
All the best,
Kell Inkston
