Today is the first of five days that A Higher Purpose will be available as a free download. I checked its rank a little after two p.m. today and was pleased to find it listed in the top 100 lists of two of Amazon's subcategories. Awesome!

What's really interesting about this is that while the vast majority of the downloads have come from Amazon.com, people using Amazon's country specific websites in Great Britain, Germany, and Canada have also downloaded AHP. Hello, potential international fans! 

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Tomorrow marks my last official day as a professional genealogist. I'll be lecturing at the Genealogical Society of Henry & Clayton Counties about Georgia's poor school and academy lists. In a way, it's a little sad to close the door on this part of my life. But, doing so will allow me to focus on the things I love, like writing, and not just fiction. I still write quite a bit of non-fiction and have a number of projects simmering on the back burner while I shift careers. Hopefully, these projects can move up in my priority list after tomorrow.

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I'm about one-sixth of the way through the first draft of Tempered, a Daughters of the People novel that I hope to release in December 2014. The lead characters are Hawthorne, an ancient Daughter with a bit of a temper, and Aaron Kesselman, a comic book illustrator and author.

When writing, I often do quite a bit of research not just on settings and situations, but on the characters themselves. Graphic art, comics in particular, is one area where my knowledge base was sorely lacking, so for the past week or so, I've immersed myself into that world by reading graphic novels and comic books, and by researching the how-tos of creating those works, including the illustration side of their production. 

I'm not much of an artist myself, though I do like to doodle. (That's my attempt at visualizing Hawthorne, to your left. I told you I wasn't much of an artist.) The deeper I dig into the creation of comic books, the more fascinated I've become on their creation. Richard and I had already discussed the possibility of turning Dierdre's story, for example, into a graphic novel aimed at young adults. (Dierdre, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Maya Bellegarde, appears in The Prophecy and Light's Bane.) 

Now, though, I'd love to turn other stories into graphic novels. I think the world of the People would hold a lot of visual appeal, particularly to audiences that are already primed to enjoy visually-told stories. Before conducting research into this world, I had no idea how much effort producing comics takes. Even with the increasing use of drawing and other software to speed the process, a graphic novel can take six to eighteen months or more to complete. That's a lot of work, but the end result is a beautiful piece of art. It's something I'll keep in mind as the stories in the Daughters of the People series are developed. Don't worry, though; someone else will do the artwork.