Home of Minimum Chance, Gauntlet, Rift, and Temporal!

My forte has always been writing and tech, but marketing has never been my best thing. However, I'm doing some things to try to cut costs while maintaining my presence. So now, we have a new website!

Minimum Chance 2 is now being sold in the shop, I had a shipment just arrive so I can begin selling those. I recently got the cover art for the 3rd book updated. I still love the original artwork, but it's in the way you look back with fondness of someone you loved and lost. I wanted something that fit the right tone of the series, and I think the new cover really encompasses that. Nearly finished updating the content for Book 3, I'm working on writing a confrontation scene involving Agent Pierce now and preparing to reveal a new zombie variant in the process. After that, we ship it off to the Library of Congress and then I can begin printing. Was very excited to see some sales originating from a gaming server I play on, marketing continues to be my weakness when it comes to working with these books, but as I previously stated, my focus is on establishing a brand and content and then I'll dedicate more effort towards marketing it all. It's all for fun anyways, despite the legalities and regulations behind all of this.

Hope to have more updates coming soon, keep an eye out for more updates on the mini-series!

Been working on proofreading my manuscript for Minimum Chance 2: Cleansing over the past several weeks. Work is ongoing for book 3's content, but I wanted to get something pushed out to the public. Proofreading is one of the more difficult parts of the job when it comes to writing. I know my story and know what is supposed to happen. If I skip a word when writing it out, it's likely I'll skip over the mistake when trying to check for errors. Spellcheck tries to help, but it can be very irritating when you know what you are writing sounds correct verbally but is improper according to the higher powers of diction and grammar.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I've got a lot of the content up through book 6 and 7 complete in its early stages. The original versions of MC1: Undying, MC2: Cleansing, and MC3: Dead of Winter were all written back when I was in high school. My skills have (at least, I think) improved, so I wanted to revise the content to show off the skills I had acquired over time. Compared to MC1, MC2's story is relatively unchanged from its draft form. Length wise, I'm up to around 560 pages and 208,000 words. Going back over some of the scenes I wrote out in the past, I almost get emotional reading some of the events because I remember the state of mind I was in at the time of writing it. MC1 might be about survival, but MC2 really encompasses the concept of loss and how difficult it is to keep on fighting when the world as you know it is dead and gone. It also introduces a major character to the story, Prototype 13. I won't spoil details if you haven't been keeping up with the mini-series posted here on the site or haven't read MC1 yet, but just know that Prototype 13 will play a major role throughout the remainder of the series. Triarch is given a face as you see the leaders of the company attempting to seize control in the middle of all the chaos. On top of all this, the dynamic shifts as nuclear meltdowns across the globe have excited atmospheric conditions, formulating the mother of all storms that is sweeping across the globe and wreaking havoc all over the world.

One thing I really like about MC2 is the cover art. The artist, Yana Snow, was my first artist I hired without having ever dealt with them or having any references. This depiction of Joseph and Mattie on the front cover was incredible, I gave her a description of what I wanted and she delivered, no question about it. Yana also had begun work on MC4's cover art before she disappeared, literally. I knew she lived in the Malaysia area so I hope she is alright, however her digital presence had completely vanished from what I can see, with her accounts lying dormant and her contact ceasing halfway through the project. All of this years ago, pre-pandemic, so there's no telling what happened, but I hope she is well wherever she is and maybe one day she'll get back in touch and we can collaborate on future projects.

In the meantime, I'm ironing out the final details with filing the copyright, making sure chapter titles aren't repeating and are numbered properly (you'd be surprised how often that happens), and getting some copies printed off. As soon as MC2 is ready for production, I'll likely post another update. I also hope to have another episode pushed out for the web series. Agent Stark and Dr. Lydia have much more work to do as all of "Season One" will take place prior to Day Zero. So stay tuned for more updates, talk to you soon!

With more work being accomplished, I felt it was a good time to post an update. Triarch Industries now exists in real life! I split out my books from my personal life and actually formed a real business to manage the books. Guess what the name is? I felt it was fitting, how interesting is it to read about a company that destroyed the world and find out down the road that the book itself was written about that company?

I've been a writer for quite a while now, so that part I'm used to. But trying to figure out how to get setup as the owner of my own business? That's a whole different game. I'm used to be having questions on how to do things and being able to go online and search it or look up a video on what to do. When it comes to the complexities surrounding forming a business, what you need to do, where you need to go, and what documents and numbers you need to pull out of thin air, I've had to rely on a bunch of people. Thankfully, one of my best friends is going to school to be an accountant, so while he might not have played a direct role, I can usually run things past him to see if they sound correct. If he doesn't know, the company he interns for does. That and thankfully several of the people who I work with on a daily basis at my other job are familiar with how this works.

Now that I have taxes established and I'm working on documents, I can really get to work on getting my content pushed out and marketed to the world. I developed a Facebook page for Minimum Chance a long time ago, but once I stopped posting content, I moved it to a private page. I may end up reactivating it soon. I'm starting small, but hopefully it'll grow. I find myself doing more at my other job involving marketing, so maybe I'll call that practice for what I'm doing here.

I've also begun work on a website mini-series that runs alongside the main storyline of Minimum Chance. It's a little something that is maybe 5-6 pages long per chapter and while it references some of the main characters, it provides a lot more lore and context for the situations going on. Now I will warn you, there may be some spoilers throughout, but there are some things you can figure out if you pay enough attention to the background of the website...

I find myself asking what it is that I hope to accomplish through the series. Wealth? Fame? Well, extra money helps. The thought of being able to pay off my house faster and spend that money on building up a retirement sounds awesome. I might be in my 20's, but I've always been the type to build for the future. When I write these stories, I see them in my head. Sometimes I encounter places in the real world that look exactly like what I imagined without knowing it ever existed. I think my greatest achievement would be if I one day got to see these stories I write being played in a movie theater. Books are great, and I love writing, but there are some scenes and emotions that are... difficult to convey through writing. Maybe one day I'll come up with a list of actors and actresses that I think could play certain roles if it ever became a movie. For now, I'll settle with writing my books and trying to get my story out there.

Keep an eye out on the site, I know I say that to try to build up excitement for the series, but the project is blossoming. I have a lot of idea and a lot of work to do, so make sure you stay up to date on what's happening. Good luck and good hunting!

I've been busy working on continuing to revise my content and will hopefully have more updates very soon! To anyone looking to write a book, finding the time to write, something to write about, and an artist to bring your story to life are easy. It's when you get down to the legal mumbo-jumbo involved with copyright that things get difficult. I've been working on filing a copyright for my book with the united States Copyright Office and been having some difficulty trying to navigate their site. It's not designed with user-friendliness in mind, so I'm currently waiting an email back from technical support on why I can't login to my own account. But, I know you're not here to listen to me ramble about boring legal stuff, you want to know how the books are coming right?

Minimum Chance 1 is complete, I actually have several copies sitting here in my office. I wanted to get all the copyright issues worked out before I finally put it up for sale on the site. In the end, I finally hit 420 pages, significantly more than the original. As I stated in my previous post, changes were mostly for clarification and to fix some lingering issues with character names and fleshing out the Jordan and Serena arc more thoroughly. It turned out great in my opinion, I am happy to have that as the final revision and I'll keep building on it as my foundation.

Minimum Chance 2 is nearly complete as well. In reality, I have already created content-wise the basics for Minimum Chance 1-6 and a significant portion of Book 7. However, due to my need to rewrite Book 1, I'm going through and giving the same treatment to all my other books. To start with, I flesh out more of the interactions with the members of the Hendricks colony. Colby is one of my closest friends in real life and while I know he doesn't read the books, he knows I have him in them and he has been a great supporter for my works. Writing these books is more of a hobby than anything, but enough people have told me that they liked the series to the point I want to share it with everyone else.

Now comes the difficult part. I'm going to attempt to explain the changes I've made so far in Book 2 without spoiling anything if I can help it. The introduction of the Sharder as an enemy infected is better explained as new variants begin to appear. I'm not sure if I ever wrote in the content for these books or any of the future books, but Sharders generally manifest in the presence of heavy radiation. One of the big points of Book 2 is that the weather all over the world is going crazy as nuclear facilities go into meltdown following the societal collapse of Day Zero. Sharders are generally rare but very dangerous, however one appears in Manchester. I figured out how to tie in the appearance of the Sharder to the team properly since there are no radioactive sources near the small town (or so we think). 

The next upgrade is based around Triarch's involvement. Triarch Industries is the name of the organization that created the virus and unleashed it on the world. While the reason behind why they committed such a heinous sin against humanity is not yet revealed, I'm beginning to set the framework for their background and setting up things for future books in the MC series as well as the Rift series. After that, the college saw some major changes throughout it. Once again, for copyright reasons, I changed the name from the actual college that I based it on to a more generic name just to be safe. Along the way, it's revealed to some members of the team as to who runs Triarch Industries and suddenly reveals why Triarch might be so interested in their group in particular. In the original versions, Jordan was able to  access "what was left of the internet" to retrieve some expositional documentary that revealed this information to the team. Instead, I tied the original discovery of Triarch's involvement with Manchester to this, making it a data file Jordan has on him which he spends the majority of the book attempting to decode to unlock more information about Triarch's ultimate weapon. 

Next up, Samantha was introduced in Book 2 as a character the team locates. Without going too in depth with her origin, there was an issue in the original version of the book where something happens to Samantha and she gets the old Jordan-and-Serena treatment and no one mentions her at all for several chapters and then we suddenly become interested in what happened again. I fixed this and gave a bit more insight into what she's thinking. 

Another change I made from the original was the location of where the team sets up their Columbus outpost. In the original, it was a movie theater with a connected arcade, the more I thought about it, the more it confused me as to why- in a series I created that I somewhat prided myself for fairly decent realism given the circumstances-, I would choose to house the team... in a movie theater. There's no clear explanation in the original series as to where the beds the team sleeps on even comes from. Further more, the copyright issue resurfaces because I named the theater specifically and it was a fairly well known location in Columbus in real life. I decided to take the safer approach, instead choosing a hotel and placing it in the general area where the theater was and basing it off a hotel I stayed at on a business trip I took back in March to open up a brand new office for my real job. 

I've also made some adjustments to the interactions with Rachel. In the original version and in this version, she is a surrogate daughter for the team. There is this concept, some call it "Dadification", where the idea of humanity's innocence is given a physical embodiment, usually through a child. I've discovered through my years of writing that Rachel is exactly that, she's the ideal of innocence in a world full of raiders and undead. However, I leaned too hard into it in the original version and decided to tone it down in this revised version. Given the time gap in-universe coming between Book 2 and Book 3, there's a good chance everything will go back to the way I had it in the original version, but for Book 2 at least, Rachel will embody the innocence and will be the surrogate daughter of the team, not just two people in particular. 

Lastly, the driving force behind Minimum Chance 2 has changed slightly. The original version was focused heavily on a vengeance plot, but from an actual apocalyptic standpoint it made little sense. When showing people my cover art between books 1-6 so far (since book 7 was only at the content stage when I decided to perform this clean-up and no cover art had been created yet), people wonder how sci-fi it gets. I've been able to explain to people so far that I ease into the sci-fi to help with the suspension of disbelief. However, with my revision to the driving force, I suppose it is safe to say that I cranked the severity up to ten with what is at stake if the group doesn't accomplish what they set out to do. The fact is, no matter how sci-fi it is, that's what you came to see in the first place if you've already made it through Book 1.  Should the issue at hand be dealt with by people who have a LOT more expertise? Absolutely. But the fact is, the team is the only group even aware of what is at risk and given what happens to the team along the way, they are the only ones possibly equipped to handle the situation. The revenge element is still there, but is more of a secondary objective aside from the glaring threat that the cult of The Apocalypto poses.

It's worked out fairly well so far and I'm nearly done with Book 2, hopefully I'll be able to make use of Labor Day weekend to try to get some more writing completed. At this moment, Minimum Chance 2 stands at 426 pages, already surpassing Book 1. I'm nearly complete with only a handful of plot points I need to finish up. I think it'll be around 500 pages total. Time to get back to work, but keep checking in for updates!

Well, I finally settled down and decided to get to work overhauling the website. I've been sitting on this site for years and never took the time to actually get it set up with everything. That's changed now, I even had to figure out how to set up the shop page which was something I never could figure out with the old site. I tried WordPress and maybe I just didn't watch enough tutorials to understand it, I'm just glad the website looks half decent!

I've begin work revising my first book and prepping it so I can release it in the store. Don't worry, anyone who has already seen my books won't see me rewriting all of history. There were a couple of things I wanted to change about the first book and I had writer's block on a different project, so I shifted gears and was able to get to work! The original version of Book 1 had around 175 pages, so far the revised version had around 350. I know, double the pages, what in the world did I change?

Well, in the years I have been working on the series, I'd like to believe that my skills as a writer have improved. I've grown in my ability to describe things, expanding when necessary and being just blunt and straight-forward at other points when it's called for. The book still takes place with one group in the city and one group trapped inside of the high school. All the same characters are returning, I just made an extra effort to make sure I wasn't compromising the timeline of the story. The Serena and Jordan storyline was something I felt I seriously underperformed with in the older version of the book. They are introduced and everything is going along, jumping back and forth between the groups, then they just fall off the face of the Earth. Several chapters later, it almost felt like I just all of a sudden remembered they existed and said "Oh, we've gotta go rescue our friends!" and it felt really rushed. Book 1 is obviously my oldest so I wasn't putting out the effort or details I've been putting into my recent projects; I wanted to change that.

Another reason I decided to rework the original book was due to some issues with names. I can say that almost every member of the main team is a real person or based on a real person. All of my friends were excited when they heard they were in my books and I think they really liked what I created. It was popular enough that it even led my high school AP Literature teacher to add my book to the AP reading list. Now that was an honor, that gave me the confidence to keep going to progressing with my stories. Since the story took place in the school in some points, I made the bad decision to reference actual people. Some of those people were the villains, and perhaps you can begin to see where the problem begins. My school didn't take too kindly to having certain members of faculty painted in an evil light. Back when I first wrote it, it was all for fun and I never meant any harm to any of the people involved in the story. Looking back at it now as an adult, I can understand why some people might have had a problem with it. The one thing I did manage to nail on the head was transforming living people into realistic characters in my book, so I understand why they might have been a little upset when I put the guy in charge of the school as a bit of a psychopath! I changed things around and made sure the names were different this time around. I hope some people can still see the similarities in the teachers and who they are actually supposed to represent, and once again I loved all my teachers and the faculty throughout my time in my high school. I just felt like I could accurately transform some of the mannerisms and traits of the people I knew into dynamic characters and though-out antagonists.

Minimum Chance: Undying is just the first book of many. I've got so much more work to do and I'm getting this website fully operational one way or another. I've considered adding a section to the site detailing a mini-series that follows something other than the main group so that way you can see how things are progressing. I'll definitely be adding a section showing off the books I plan on releasing. Keep an eye out and I hope I'll have more updates for you soon!