Tim Akers

The Iron Hound releases today! I’m excited because this is the first time two of my books have been on the shelves at the same time. I’m hoping that will provide a boost to book one, as well as additional support for the series as a whole.

Right now it looks like The Iron Hound is in most stores, though there might be a delay in databases updating and shipments arriving. I was in a B&N yesterday and they hadn’t received their copies yet, and said books sometimes didn’t come until the day of, or possibly a day delayed, so I’m not worried yet. Ideally the book would be on every shelf that has a copy of The Pagan Night on it, but that’s not the case yet.

I drove a little farther today than I usually do, to write at the Starbucks where I first started writing oh so many years ago. I’ve been writing since I was a kid, taking the appropriate classes and making the appropriate sounds in college. I even landed a few freelance jobs in the gaming industry my senior year, which had me thinking that maybe I could make a living at that. But as soon as college was over I got too involved in my daily life, and took a forced break from writing.

That all started to turn around at this Starbucks. On Tuesday nights, my wife took a pilates class at the park district across the parking lot, and I would come in here and write. One night a week, for one hour. That’s all the time I was able to get. Fifteen years ago I made a commitment to deliver on all this talk about being a writer, and came out three or four times a week, almost always to this coffee shop, never here for much longer than a couple hours before it was time to head home again.

I wrote my first three books here. Four, actually, but one of them is never going to be published. I wrote almost all the original Veridon stories at one of these tables. There used to be a B&N in the same shopping center, and when Heart of Veridon came out I walked over and signed my first ever published novel, then came back here and worked on the next one.

Decades after all these things happened, my fifth novel is coming out. Today I’m working on the sixth, with a short break to review the three pitches I have for my next project, and probably tinker with the thing I’m working on with my dad.

I’m not going to get much actual work done today. Most of this is ritual, things I’m doing to mark the anniversary, to talk publicly about what it’s like to be a writer. The work takes time. Persist. Twenty years ago, this kind of success was only a dream. Twenty years from now, it might have been my high water mark, or just one more step in a greater success story. Or something else. The fact is, we don’t know what tomorrow will be.

So work.