Welcome to my world!

I'm James Maxey, the author of the Bitterwood fantasy trilogy composed of Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and Dragonseed, a pair of superhero novels, Nobody Gets the Girl and Burn Baby Burn, plus my new Dragon Apocalypse series. I've also published numerous short stories, the best of which are reprinted in my collection, There is No Wheel. This website is focused exclusively on my published fiction. At my second blog, Jawbone of an Ass, I serve up loudmouthed blathering about politics, religion, money, and other topic polite people have the sense to avoid.

If you're a fan of dragon-centric sword and sorcery with a touch of superheroics, the Dragon Apocalypse is being written for you! In fact, even if you're not a fan of fantasy, you might want to check out the books, since my approach to this series is to strip out everything I find boring about epic fantasy and focus on the fun stuff, like larger than life characters bravely throwing themselves into battle with dragons, and the dragons eating them. Greatshadow, Hush, and Witchbreaker are now available. The next book, Soulless, should be out in late 2013/early 2014.

Definitely coming out in 2013 will be my next superhero novel, tentatively titled "The Adventures of Cut-Up Girl." Watch this space for further news!


Sunday, September 5, 2010

My Kindle Journey part whatever, and a winner, maybe...

I thought I had this kindle thing licked. The key was to convert the file to text first, then consitently apply styles in Word to ensure the conversion didn't encounter any gliches, like I'd encountered in my initial attempts at posting Bitterwood. Dragonforge was much more successful... except, for some reason, my chapter titles aren't consistent. The style I applied was 14 point, centered, bold, all caps text for my chapter heads. But, it seems like Kindle can only translate three attributes from a style sheet. All my headings are bold, and all are centered, but some are a mix of uppercase and lowercase letter, but larger than the chapter text, and some are all caps, but the same size as the chapter text. I'm sure there must be some emoticon for throwing one's hands up in the air and shaking one's head in utter bewilderment.

My other frustration this time was that it was a much longer wait for this title to go live than Bitterwood. Maybe they have a lot of people on vacation at Amazon, but this time it took well over a week from my initial upload to the title becoming available. I've decided not to change the file to fix the chapter titles because I don't want to take the book down for another week to fix what's really a issue that I suspect most readers won't notice.

So... Dragonforge is live on Kindle! Next up, Dragonseed, then I'll switch gears and get all three books ready for the Nook.

Finally, some of you may be wondering whatever became of the superpowers context. I had about 20 different superpowers sent in and did my drawing for a winner Thursday morning. I drew an email from someone who signed his submission Korallieam. I emailed to let him know he'd won, but I haven't heard back from him yet with a full name or a mailing address. Hopefully he's just on a Labor Day vacation.