Belle Plaine!

What a great day!!! Mike and I drove over to Belle Plaine, Iowa, on July 3rd for our first official signing / reading / discussion about our new book, Hade's Gambit. We stopped by the library to check in, then had lunch with the kids who came (Brandon and Annika) at the Lincoln Cafe. It was about 100 degrees out, so we were happy to stay indoors and talk about our book. Check out the pictures!!!

This is a stack of our books. Man, isn't that cover just the bomb! Seriously, it is super awesome. We will be giving a shout out to Clayton for the rest of our lives for how sweet this cover looks! 

Mike and I behind our table. And yes, real authors wear blue!

I don't always sign books, but when I do, I sign Hade's Gambit. Stay thirsty, my friends!

We discussed the book briefly, talking about what it is all about and explaing what we wanted people to think about it - mostly we want them to think they like it.



Mike read a cool part all about Belle Plaine. We read about the Lincoln Cafe, about the characters in that chapter, and about the cemetery, where important events occur. Since we were in Belle Plaine, it went over very well!

All in all, the reading can only be considered a success!!! We sold over 30 books (including my mother's, which was fine - at least she told me it was fine!), signed them all, and had a blast. I'll put up video that my daugher Annika took of us soon. We answered lots of questions, including if people who don't like zombies would like our book (yes), who did the awesome cover (Clayton!), how was it working with three authors (the best of times and the worst of times) and what would the book have been like if only one of you had written it (my answer - if it was Mike, it would have been awful, if it was me, it still would have been pretty good!). But, in all honesty, the best part was seeing all of Mike's family and friends come out to support us. Belle Plaine is a truly great place, and we wouldn't have put it in our book if we weren't hoping that someday tourists would come to Belle Plaine hoping to eat at the Lincoln Cafe and tour the cemetery. They rewarded us on the 3rd by treating us like rock stars, proving even more so that they deserve to be recognized for being truly special. So, yeah Belle Plaine, yeah Mike Koogler and Jaren Riley, and yeah Hade's Gambit!!!What a great way to start off our Book Tour!!!

P.S. Look for a post in the near future from Mike about Belle Plaine as well!

At a distance

I wanted to write a bit tonight to explain how easy, and how difficult, it is to write a book with two other people, neither of which lives in the same city as you. I live in Cedar Rapids Iowa (the City of Five Seasons!), Mike lives in Iowa City (well, actually Coralville), and Jaren is now in the big city of Denver (and still morning the loss of Tim Tebow). Mike and I are only about 20 to 25 minutes away from each other, which is more than conducive to getting together from time to time, but Jaren is a good deal farther away. So, in order to communicate with each other face to face (sort of), we have gotten to the point where now Mike will come over to my place, or I will head over to Mike's, and we will facetime with Jaren. Here are a few photos of us doing this. I am actually texting Jaren's wife Jessie as she is taking our picture in the second one. Yeah, that is how advanced we are :) This was taken a few months ago- I think we were discussing how Hade was going to dress up as a butterfly in a flashback of his days in ballet school.

One night, we actually all needed to chat with our publisher, Karen, so we set up facetime, and put my ipad in the middle of Mike and I on the couch, and then set up my laptop with a Skype session. We realized at that moment that while this worked, it was a bit clumsy. So, we are looking into other technology for the three of us to work together, and there is a lot out there. Some options are google plus, others are webinar based, like Adobe Connect Pro, and then there is the oldie but goodie of tying tin cans together and stretching them between us. Yeah, that third one isn't a very good option, but the other two have proven possibilities.

The problem with working with people in other cities is simply one of communication. We had some issues with our edits last fall because we were communicating via email for everything! While email is great for some things, it absolutely sucks for having a sustained, creative conversation about whether our character Petr should stab an undead opponent through the heart first, and then through the eye, or go the other way around, with the eye first and then the heart. Well, that was only one dicussion, but we had tons of them. And what we found, is that it is really easy to bicker and argue about who killed who when you can't see or hear the person you are dealing with. Mike and I would fight like crazy, sending each other nasty emails, and then we would call each other and be fine in about 10 seconds. So, we learned the hard way that in dealing with important issues, nothing beats real conversation, even if it is streaming live over an ipad.

Now, the past month we have been working furiously on book two, but we are still in the "just get it down on the computer and we'll deal with the consequences later" mode. So, for example, Jaren sent us a great chapter today where some of the characters are attacked in the desert. They then have this amazing discussion about the nature of God and mercy v. justice. It is super hard core stuff, and I loved it. Of course, it is 33 pages long, and Mike and I haven't even touched it! But, we will probably just leave it as is after a few notes, and move on to the next chapter. Once we get most of the first half of the book done, then we will go through and really start working through these chapters, and at that point we are going to make sure that we have our communication system up and running smoothly, because we are not going to make the mistakes we made the first tiime around.

So, the question we often get asked is how do three of you write a book together, and the answer is carefully, thoughtfully, and most importantly, with live, synchronous communication. We got together in Denver a month ago and worked our way entirely through the synopsis of book two, a process that took us a day together, and would have been a monthlong nightmare apart. We are always better when we are together, so that is what we are going to do as much as possible in the future. So, it is definitely possible to write a book with two other people who live in other cities, but you have to do it right or it will be a disaster. Of course, it helps to have great human beings to work with, but we can save that for another blog.  

Join us in Chicago in August at Comic Con!

So, now that the book is ofiicially sort of out, I am planning on going back and doing some of the blogging that I wanted to do over the past months but have been too busy to do. So, look for little tidbits most days, and longer posts about fun stories, important events, and other news at least once or twice a week. I'll try to have something really fun on Mondays, so stop by and check it out! I am including a link to the Chicago Comic Con website. We will be there August 9 through the 12, in our own booth hanging out and selling copies of our book. It is the big event of the summer for us, so if you are in the area stop by and come visit us!!! If you scroll near to the bottom of the page, you will see Mike, Jaren and Jed, all individually, with a blub about us and our book. It is near the bottom because they have actors first, and then comic drawers / toy makers / authors (there aren't a lot of us authors there) below, and it is in alphabetical order. But, we will be hanging out with Stan Lee, William Shatner, John Cena, The Situation, Draco Malfoy, Scott Bakula, James Hong, Bruce Campbell, and Luke Perry, amongst dozens of other important people. Just the fact that my name is on the same website as those people is pretty cool! Anyway, look for a longer post on Monday all about how to write a book with two other people at a distance!

The book is available on Amazon.com!

Here is the URL to check out and hopefully purchase our new book!!! It isn't available to ship yet, but should be soon. I love that it says our publication date was June 8th. Why not!
Amazon.com site for Hade's Gambit

How our original prologue became six chapters, a different prologue, and 83 pages long!

So, a while ago I promised a short blog post about how our "prologue" became six chapters, and a prologue. Unfortunately, if we would have realized how we worked together back then, we could have avoided a lot of pain, suffering, and probably about 240 pages of our 847 final pages. Basically, we really wanted to focus on character and character development so we started with six main characters. We had Owen DiConte, an honorable young man who really wants to do right by the world, Xanadu, a young African basketball player (who was later named Gideon), Petr, a Russian mafia member, Father Dalacourt, a Vatican priest, David Livingston Sumbawanga, an old African leader, and Alexis Kennedy, a young woman and love interest for Owen. So, we thought it would be great to introduce all of our characters with just a little snipet. We also wanted to make sure that we got Hade into the introduction, if only briefly. So, we started writing little pieces about each of them so that the reader would know who the main chracters were and how they were connected to the story. So, we started building up our prologue, thinking it would just be a short thing, perhaps six to ten pages. Wow, were we wrong. We soon realized that many of these short vinetes were becoming longer and longer. Eventually, we made the decision that we had to break them up into individual chapters. Some of them kept growing and growing as we worked on the book. We would realize that Petr needed something else added to the beginning, or that Dalacourt wasn't quite right and we needed to change something there, and so they grew and grew and grew. I was the worst offender with the Petr chapter, spending perhaps ten pages explaining Catherine's Palace (which, I found out on our last round of edits that I had gotten much of it wrong anyway!!!). So, even after cutting huge parts of these chapters, they still ended up being 83 pages! And, we added a prologue about our character John having a vision of the future, which is a few pages as well. So, honestly, we completely learned our lesson, right? We have to be careful about adding too much and making the book too long... Well, we are working on Book Two right now and just had to split two chapters in half because they were too long. So, obviously we are still cursed with the problem of writing too much. But, at least looking back at it, we know that it was a problem we have had from the beginning. And, hopefully, we will continue to have for the rest of our time writing together! :)

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...