Hi. It’s been a while.

Hi.

It's been a while.

In 2011 I started an endeavor of trying to actually finish a fantasy novel, and discovering the world of independent publishing helped ignite a passion that led to six books over the following seven years. I released Lightfall in 2012, and burned through five more books. Then, about a third of the way through the seventh, the series finale, I just… stopped. That was 2018.

I reduced distribution down to Amazon alone, removing my ebooks from other sites. I let my old domain name expire for my blog, and repointed ahmbren.com to the Amazon author page. I underwent some major life changes, and walked away from the world of Ahmbren.

But now the spark is back. I intend to finish the series. But to do so, I'm letting myself restart the seventh book from scratch, giving myself the freedom to abandon its original vision.

But as I said, I've been away from this world for a while. To prepare, I need to re-immerse myself. I started by experimenting with digital AI narration, until I found a service that really sparked with me. To get a quality AI narrated book, you can't just hit "go" and hope it will turn out ok. You have to listen to every paragraph, every line, forcing re-renders when needed. This process is forcing me to relive every scene in the first six books. (I'll do a blog post on this topic).

I also took the plunge and started using AI as the building blocks for book covers that I finish in an art program (editing, repainting portions, and sometimes assembling multiple generated images). (I'll do a dedicated blog post for this too).

This immersion of listening to the audio and bringing some of the vision to beautifully rendered imagery is just the immersion I need.  The plan now is focus on bringing the existing books to audio, and once that's complete, I'll start work in earnest on writing the conclusion of The God Who Lived trilogy and series finale: The Last World.

More to follow…

~ksl