Here are some photos of our completed book. Doesn't it look amazing! 847 pages of pure gold! We are busy working on book Two and are putting our summer reading/signing tour together. At this point, expect to see at least some of us at Belle Plaine on July 3rd, Iowa City on July 13th and 15th, and in Chicago at Comicon August 9th through the 12th. We are looking for a few more places to sign our book, so as soon as we know more we'll post it. The book should be available within a few days!

Pre-order!

Hade's Gambit: Book One of the Krypteia Conspiracy, is now available for pre-order! Visit the publisher's website at mbedzipublishing.com, got to the "buy now" link, and you've got it! It will also be available on barnesandnoble.com, amazon.com, the kindle and the nook on June 6th. While you're there, check out the publisher's other books too. One just won a wicked awesome award. Jaren Riley, Jed Peterson, and Michael Koogler.

Yoko breaks up the band

Well, not really!!! I am just writing to let everyone know that Mike is getting a book published on his own! Called Convergence, it is an epic tale of... Well... I will let Mike tell you all about it! I can't wait to read it! And it is good he is done with it, as Mike and I are flying out to Denver next week to get kick-started on Rise of Cain, book two in the Krypteia Conspiracy. And, other big news, we are up on the Comiccon in Chicago website. Things are coming togrther!

The Girl from Ipanema is not in our book...

This post is mostly for Jaren and Mike to laugh at me, but here goes anyway! There are many things to think about when writing with other people, but one of them is that sometimes there is just no way of knowing what type of reaction you are going to get from your writing. What I mean by that is that sometimes you write something that you think is really good and you get super excited about it and then you hand it off to your co-writers and you are hit with a resounding "NO!" I have a perfect example of this from our book. I wrote a little bit about Windy where she is walking down the street messing with boys. She is wearing a skimpy little outfit and seeing how many guys she can get to look her way. It was a funny little piece, meant more to showcase how Windy was somewhat calloused but more so that she was still trying to have a bit of fun. I wanted to let the reader know that she was still a human being and that despite her awful situation that she could still smile. I had her singing the Girl from Ipanema, which starts out "tall and tan and young and lovely..." which I imagined Windy as being. It made perfect sense to me. I even included some of the song in Portuguese. It was brilliant, so I sent it off to Mike and Jaren, and Mike replied right away with an absolute no. I could probably dreg up some of the emails he sent, but the basic message was that he hated that song more than anything in the entire world and would basically either stop writing the book or shoot himself in the head if we left that part in the book. Obviously I had hit a nerve! But, if I learned anything from having two parents, it is that if one person says no you always try to see if you can get the other one to say yes. So, I checked in with Jaren to see what he had to say. And, to my surprise, he said that he absolutely hated that song as well. Jaren and I have both lived in Brazil, so I just assumed that he would love that song, but boy was I ever wrong. It brought out a level of hatred in him that I have never seen before. Undetered, I pressed forward, pleading my case a few more times to both of them to keep that part in. I tried everything I could think of, but to no avail. The truth was, that for one reason or another, my writing partners absolutely detested the Girl from Ipanema. So, after a month of tastefully and tactfully pushing for this (and don't listen to them if they tell you I was anything but tasteful and tactful :) I finally relented. Time went by and I found another place to include the Girl from Ipanema. It was just as a reference, and it was actually in Book Two and it worked really well. I was thinking that perhaps they just didn't like my take on Windy, and that it wasn't actually the song itself they disliked but the theme of the passage, so I would try again. To be honest, I'm surprised that they boys didn't start up a websited called firejedpeterson.com to get rid of me. In about three seconds I had received emails from Jaren and Mike telling me that there was NO WAY that song was getting in any of the books. So, I did some research and found another song from Brazil to include and used that instead. There was no mistaking their message - the girl must go. And so, go she did. So, while this was sad for me, the main point to this story is that while there is almost always a compromise to be made when writing with other people, sometimes there is just nothing you can do. Mike can tell the story someday of his little zombie cop-killing boy that got cut in somewhat the same fashion. I would absolutely love it if someday we put together an extended edition of the book with some of the stuff that got cut out, but I know that if that happens, and if I bring up adding the Girl from Ipanema, that most certainly I would wake up the next day with a horse's head in my bed. No, the Girl from Ipanema will never get to know Hade. It is a shame, I feel, but sometimes life is like that. Sometimes you just have to move on, even when you never do. Tchao, Garota! Ate o prossimo!

Getting Russia write

One of the things we have tried really hard to do is to make the world our book is set in as realistic as possible. This is easy for places we have been to and have lived in, like Utah, Belle Plaine, Brazil, etc. but what about a place none of us had been to, like Russia? We decided early on that we needed a young Russian from the Mafia. Yeah... It was way outside of our wheelhouse. So, I got started working on it, doing research online about the area. I fell in love with the idea of Tsarskoe Selo, the Versailles of the Russian Royal family, and decided to set the story there and in the nearby St. Petersburg. I had a friend at the University of Iowa, Justus Harzok, who was studying there, and he gave me all sorts of good info. One thinghe shared with me is that when a Russian mafia member kills someone, they leave a red rose on the body so people know what happened. So, of course, that makes it into the book! The problem was, as we got started, i got carried away. I wrote probably close to ten pages setting the stage for our characters in Russia. I was explaining ballastrudes and carpets and on and on and on. I included quotes from Petr the Great, Russian historical sources, and an extended biography on Russian literary giants. So, this got pared down over the years to the present state. And then, as we were editing the book, I reaalized that I had made some mistakes in my original research, including attributing the palace to the wrong Catherine, so those were fixed. So, hopefully as some one reads through the descriptions of Russia in the book, they will feel like it is really real, and it will help center the book in the modern world. It was easier by far to write about a place you are familiar with, but with a good deal of research amd a few friends, you can still make it work!
Jed...

Writing with Others: The Story of Krypteia part 1

I wanted to go through and write a bit today about how we began this process. If you watch the video of us "On the Fly" you'll know that we met at church, discussed writting books, and decided to get together to discuss our ideas. We met in Mike's basement, and I remember us sort of just talking about our ideas. I remember that I had recently taken a class on Greek History, and was enamored with the concept of the Krypteia, a group of Spartans whose job was to make sure the neighboring Helots didn't rise up in revolution. That meant they could kill anyone they wanted, whenever they wanted, for whatever reason they wanted, all for the good of the Spartans. So, I wanted to include sort of that secret society influence into the book - sort of that secrety group trying to run the world. Mike wanted to do something more end of the world, and Jaren really wanted to push the "hero" epic. We started talking about characters, and I think this is what brought our book ideas together more than anything. I had a certain character in mind, Mike had another, Jaren had his, and we sort of started thinking about these as real people, and what would they be like and what sorts of decisions would they make in certain situations. As we started talking about our characters, it became clear that we could merge some of our plot lines together. And, as we started doing that, we came to the relevation that we merge everyting together into a series of books that would cover everything we wanted to. So, it was the characters in the book, more than anything, that drove the process towards the three of us working together. I still have the printed off sheet with our first stab at these characters - some of them are spot on with how the book ended up. We have a Russian mobster, a hero, a tall African (although originally his name was Xanadu!), and a Catholic priest. They all made the book. What is really interesting to me, though, looking back on this, is that my story, that of the secret society named Krypteia, is not really that prevelant in book one. We are writing book two right now, and it will have a much more expanded roll in that book, but it is sort of a side-note in book one. We knew from the beginning that we would get to it, and as book one grew and coalesced and became what it is, we realized that it would have to go to book two. So Hade's Gambit from the beginning has been not about me, or Mike, or Jaren, but about the characters and the story. Anyway, that is a brief bit on how we started the books. Next week I'm going to discuss how our original prologue morphed into the first six chapters. Have a great day!

America Reads "Hade" Day

I have been trying to get this video to upload for a few days now, so I'm sorry for missing my Friday post. It is a video of me reading to my son Jaeden's sixth grade class from Hade's Gambit. The section I'm reading from is the chapter where Hade goes to the chemical plant in Brazil to blow it up, but not before he has some fun. We have since made a few small edits to this piece as we've been finishing it up, and I edited it just a bit for the audience. Although there isn't really anything in there that the average sixth grader couldn't read, this chapter, as a few others, are a bit violent. As Hade says at one point - you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. So, an example here is that Hade shoots a man with a Desert Eagle, and in the story it says he makes a hole the size of a cantelope in the man's chest, and here I think that just became "he shot him." But, this was a fun bit to read - it is one of my son's favorite parts, and to be honest, one of mine as well. One note - I shot this on a Flip camera, so it isn't the best, and I didn't have the resources to edit it very well, so the book starts about a minute in, and then it is goes until about nine minutes in, with a few minutes of questions at the end. Thanks to the sixth graders in the class, and for all the help from Prairie Creek Intermediate School. It was a great time. Enjoy watching!

Writers on Writing: Home Grown!

Here is a video of Mike, Jaren and I discussing our book. This was done last summer. I think if we did this again, after our editing process, we would have a lot more to say :)

Editing Gives me Morning Sickness

It really is true that getting a book published is like having a child. The writing is the fun part, the editing is the pregnancy, and the marketing and publicizing must be the birth. Then comes the parties, balloons, and sleepless night wondering if the kid is going to grow up and make enough money to take care of you how you deserve! So, we are just a few weeks away from being done with the pregnancy part of our process and ready to go into labor to get the thing taken care of. There is a reason we haven't blogged for the past few months - it is because no one likes to have pictures of themselves pregnant. We had morning sickness for quite a while, cried, got depressed, wondered why whe had gone to all the work to get this far, and in the end reached resignation to the fact that we would have to just stay calm and carry on. And yes, probably not the best metaphor for pregnancy, but you get the picture.

But, now that we are nearly through with this phase, I think it is worth a look back on how the whole thing went. It was a unique experience on a lot of levels. First off, Mike, Jaren and I had NO idea what we were doing. Literally. About a month ago our editor, Karen, sent us an email with how you are supposed to edit a book and included how we had screwed up almost every step of the way. Yeah, hilarious. Except for Karen! So, we went into the thing really quite blind. And I would say - Mike, this isn't how we are supposed to be doing this, and Jaren would say, Jed, why are you doing this, and Mike would say, we have to have this done yesterday, and all of us would just get so confused because we all THOUGHT we knew what we were doing, but really, I think three salamanders in a jar could have figured it out quicker then us.

We hadn't really prepared ourselves or the book for editing, which was a problem, I think. We thought - the editor will fix all of it :). Well, the editor, bless her heart, tried to fix as much as she could, but she assumed that the book was how we wanted it to be. We realized, a bit late in the game to be true, that the book wasn't how we wanted it to be. At all. And Elizabeth (our editor) and Karen (our publisher), found lots of flaws that we sort of kind of actually really knew were there. An example was that we had a baby in a few scenes. None of us liked it, but we didn't know what to do with the dumb thing. It really got in the way of everything (and if my kids are reading this - that is most definitely NOT a metaphor for real children - mostly). It took some work, but we managed to get rid of the baby, and there was much rejoicing. But it wasn't simply finding a comma, changing a then to a than and vice versa (which happened a lot due to a strange tick I have with that word), or cutting out some fluff. We had to redo a ton of stuff. We basically spent three days doing nothing but rewriting the entire pay-off chapter. Yeah, it was a mess, but so much better.

But, we got it done, were very happy, and waited for round two. This really was more editing, but I got carried away. It wasn't that I wanted to change things, there were just tweeks that needed to be done. And we had rushed through the first round so quickly that there were things that hadn't been fixed. So, we went through round two and did the best we could. We didn't change story lines, plots, characters, etc., but we did a lot of changes. I think at that point Karen really was doubting her decision to take us on. But, we got it to her, it was finished. Mostly.

So, now we are on the last round of edits, and we are just fixing up little copy-editing things, and should be done by the end of the month. Then comes the heavy breathing, the pushing, and with any luck, a happy, healthy, baby that will make us all rich.

My goal, therefore, is to write at least once a week, hopefully on Fridays, to update everyone on how the book is going, what we are up to, and any bits of information I can share. I will probably put up a few passages from time to time that are pretty cool. But what I really want to do is to continue to tell the story of Mike, Jaren and I how we came to write the book and how we are writing the book. So, I will probably from time to time look back on some part of the process and include information on how we did certain things, or how we came to certain conclusions, or how we survived the process. It should be fun, and I'm looking forward to it.

Okay, that is it for today. This was a very short (trust me on this) outline of the past four months. They seemed to drag on forever but now that they are gone it seems like it was just a blink of the eyes. We are so proud of the book that will come out hopefully this May, and we hope you like it. From us to you, have a great one!

Edits

If you are wondering why we are not blogging, this is why! 897 pages of pure gold!


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