Let’s Talk About Escort (Pt.1)

As you all are probably aware, on April 1st (no joke!) my first published book will be released.  Escort is an assembly of three short stories, all centering on the plot of an ‘escort mission’ happening in each story.  The first story is called The Shrine Maiden’s Secret and it takes place in Japan.  The Yamana family are a venerable samurai clan, but the daimyo has only one child: A daughter named Matsuuri.  Matsuuri is smart and beautiful and loved by her father.  She has recently been accepted to the position of Shrine Maiden of the temple at Hounenji.

Matsuuri wearing the Do (armor) and Menpo (mask) of her all-female Honor Guard.

Hounenji is a holy shrine dedicated to fertility (and a good harvest, of course!) and is run by a Miko, a Shrine Maiden, rather than a male monk.  A great honor for any clan to have a member of their family run the place.  So all the neighboring clans want to ruin the Yamana’s chances at gaining even more esteem by either killing or deflowering Matsuuri (the Miko must be a virgin when she takes over control of the shrine).

Who is the only person that can escort her to Hounenji?  The greatest swordsman of the Yamana clan, of course!  The Red Demon of the Yamana: Wakahisa Yachiro!

‘Red’ Demon, because he has auburn hair. In case you were curious.

Yachiro’s father was a drunkard who failed to keep watch at his gate when the Yamana were betrayed and attacked by their former allies, the ambitious and ruthless Sogo clan.  Yachiro enjoys two things: Sword fighting and sex.  When he isn’t training his craft of swordsmanship, he’s putting the moves on the widows of his dead clansmen.

So…who thought it was a good idea to put the clan pervert in charge of escorting the 19-year-old virgin princess to Hounenji?

 

Officer Rambo, of course!

 

No, just kidding.  It was me, I wrote it.  I can prove it, too…

 

See? It has my name on it.

 

 

And as far as names go, how do you like Matsuuri and Yachiro’s pictures up there?  That’s the work of a young lady named Kiersten R. Nichols that I found a few months ago while looking at possible artists for upcoming Nic3Ntertainment projects.  I liked her work and decided to hire her for the art to be used in the book trailers that will be making the rounds soon.

Kiersten’s easy to work with, dependable, and has good prices.  If you need some artwork done I’d highly suggest heading over to her site (by clicking on her name) and buyin’ yourself some artwork.

~RCS

Escort: 1st Round of Edits Completed!

Congratulations to me!  I am one step closer to that coveted position of making you people buy my book!  Err, uhh, of course I mean the coveted position of being a published author.

Yes, that’s what I mean…

The first, and also the second, round of edits are over and I thought I’d share some of the process of editing a book for publication.  Mostly my idiocies.

Muttering?

Simple things like this are the kind of stuff, along with some comma placement and periods.  This is a pretty solid mistake and most of them will be like this when you’re editing a book for publishing.  I wanted to put it in here first, so you get a grasp of what 80-90% of the edits are.

Wary vs. Weary

This one annoyed me, personally, because I had used the correct word, Wary, in the first draft.  When I was editing it for submission I was reading through and second-guessed myself.  I changed wary to weary and nary a good idea was had that day.

 

Leap Into Action!

This comes from writing parts of the book so far apart.  A pretty simple mistake to fix, just Crtl+F to find and replace all the leaped cases with leapt cases, or vice versa.

 

Qutuuuuz!!

Another common thing you have to watch out for is having characters use each other’s names unnecessarily.  It would sound weird, Audience, if I referred to you by your names every time I said something to you.

 

Who’s They?

 

Aohw?

 

Yup!  Yeah, I did that…I spelled the word ‘whoa’ wrong.  3 times in a row, no less.

 

These are the kinds of things you find out about yourself when editing a book.  You find out, no matter how hard you try, that you are invariably a dumbass.  It might only be once or twice in a book, but somewhere…something…will make you feel like an idiot.  But that’s why we have editors, to make us not look idiots when our books get printed.

~RCS

Also to steal all our commas!  Editors feed off them, like comma vampires!

Cover Yourself!

As I’ve mentioned somewhat recently, this site is ostensibly to promote my writing.  It’s really no secret.  However, aside from a few free games that really aren’t making a whole lot of money (we are currently about $500 in the hole for Monster and Dynasty Heroes), there’s no writing here to really market, is there?

 

Well guess what Mother Smuckers?

Okay so “Mother+Smuckers” doesn’t get much besides jelly recipes on Google…

To be released in April of 2015, my first published book will be released.  It is called Escort.  It is a collection of three short stories revolving around the escort mission trope.  Each story consists of a subversion of an escort mission.  In the first story, a philandering samurai must escort a virgin princess to a holy temple without letting her be wounded or deflowered.  The second story is a little more historical; taking part in the middle of the 13th century in what is now Egypt and Saudi Arabia as a female mercenary is hired to escort the Sultan’s wife to Mecca for the Hajj.  The final story is a dark tale of a Scottish baron’s daughter being kidnapped and dragged across the border into England by an English baron’s son.  The only person who can rescue her?  A Welsh master huntsman who has fled his homeland and serves the Scottish baron.

In each of these tales there is also a hidden penis.

Not unlike Disney films.

In this case, however, it is that in each story one of the characters lives with a terrible secret (or an awesome secret, depending on your political party).  And that secret is that, one character from each story is intersex.  Without spoiling any of the fun…one of the characters is a female with a penis, the other is androgynous but identifies as a tomboyish woman, and another is a man with a vagina (who is forced to identify as female by his family).  If you are familiar with the Japanese term Futanari then you’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s going on (the link is NSFW…uhh, not that much of anything I’m talking about in this paragraph really is SFW, actually).

And yes, the stories are all erotic romances, but they also have action, political intrigue, adventure, and humor.  With all the recent news about transgender and intersex people right now, what with CNN devoting half their day’s news to Bruce Jenner’s transformation into a woman and the recent suicide of Leelah Alcorn still fresh in everybody’s mind I hope that my book can help be a bridging point.  It’s not just something to read while squatting on a sybian (ridiculously NSFW link!) or ‘rubbing in some lotion’.  It’s a set of three stories with as close to real people as I can portray in writing.  Real people with androgynous features and enough extra genitalia to confuse CPAC for a decade.

So remember me and Escort come April when it is released!

That’s my name on ‘at sonuva-gunn! 🙂

~RCS

Now you know why my updates have been a bit irregular.  Of course, regular updates from me might be kind of irregular around here, actually.

Does Anyone Remember What This Site Is About?

Like I mentioned a few days ago when I was fangirling about Peter Hollens after going so long without an update…

Uhh…I totally meant to say fan ‘boy’ of course.

..right, so, as I was saying…I mentioned writing a new piece.  Well, unfortunately for you sorry sods you might be able expect some more updates from me soon, because I just finished it today.  Round ‘abouts 20,000 words, it is to be a companion piece to my earlier story The Shrine Maiden’s Secret.  It is tentatively called The Sultana’s Mission.  Together the two short stories are planned to be published as a double-feature novella that I’ve tentatively (I like that word, don’t I?) named Escort.

Tentatively, like a contemplative tentacle, right?

I can’t really give much more information right now, because I’m beginning the first phase of the editing and ‘re-writes’ for The Sultana’s Mission, but hopefully within a few months I’ll be formally published.

Which reminds me…does anyone remember that this site was supposed to be a marketing platform for my writing?  Yeah, so I might finally be using it for it’s intended purpose, which is pretty awesome.

~RCS

You realize this is the first time I’ve used the Writing category on this site in over 2 years?  I am so bad at blogging… Z_Z