First off, paperback and hardcover copies of The Phobia of Renegade X are now available!

And if you missed it, The Torment of Renegade X is also available in paperback.

Now, onto upcoming book announcements:

Book 2 in the Dragonbound series is called Honorbound. (You can add it on Goodreads here.) It’s not done yet, but I’m aiming for a late 2017/early 2018 release. Watch here for pre-order info or sign up for the newsletter (top of the left column on my website) to be notified when it goes up.

Virginia St. George thinks she’s finally found where she belongs. She’s been living with Amelrik and the other dragons of Hawthorne clan for the last few months, learning their language and traditions, and has become a useful part of the community. Or so she thinks.

 

But when Amelrik’s father announces that he’s arranged a marriage for him, and it turns out the general populace sees her as nothing more than a human leech taking advantage of their prince, Virginia realizes she wasn’t fitting in as much as she thought, and her place at Hawthorne clan is more tenuous than ever.

 

If she wants to keep the love of her life and the only place that’s ever really felt like home, Virginia will have to thwart an arranged marriage, stop a war, and prove that she’s just as worthy as the next dragon. Er, human. And she’ll have to do it fast, before time runs out and she’s forced to leave the dragon world forever.

There will also be a book 5 in the Renegade X series. It’s called The Rivalry of Renegade X. (You can add it on Goodreads, too.) While I don’t have a blurb for it yet, I can tell you that Damien’s “good twin” from another dimension shows up and makes Damien’s life more difficult. >:) I’m hoping to have this out sometime next year (probably late next year), but it’s way too early to say.

It’s out! The Phobia of Renegade X is finally here! It’s currently available in ebook format, with paperback and hardcover coming soon (like, hopefully within the next week), and audiobook coming… eventually (but realistically probably sometime next year–I’ll keep you posted). This book has been a long time coming, and I’m so excited to finally get to share it with you guys.

And if you missed the news, I had to change cover artists for this one, but I LOVE how it turned out!

Damien’s always been afraid of heights, but he’s never been afraid of fieldwork or of being in the spotlight. At least, he wasn’t before the gala—the one where his grandpa nearly caused a massacre and heroes from the League almost killed his best friend. Now he finds himself dreading the very things he used to love, and all he wants is to skate by in school, avoid fieldwork, and keep a low profile.

But avoiding his fears isn’t as easy as he hopes, especially when the school decides to send him and his best friend to hunt down a dangerous criminal. And as if that isn’t bad enough, it turns out he also has to pass a flying test if he wants to make it through the school year, even though his debilitating fear of heights means it’s pretty much impossible.

In order to pass the test and catch a criminal, Damien accepts help from unlikely allies. But when his mission goes south and he accidentally lets a terrible weapon fall into the wrong hands, he’ll have to overcome his doubts and save his friends from a psychotic killer bent on using his worst fears against him.

Ten years ago, I was just finishing up The Rise of Renegade X. (It was the summer after I graduated college–at 25, not 22 like you might be thinking–and the last Harry Potter book had just come out–I remember devouring it in between writing sessions.) I wrote book 1 in a 28-day whirlwind from concept to finish, and it was by far the best thing I’d ever written. (In fact, for a long time, I worried I’d never write anything as good as that, which thankfully wasn’t true.) A year and a half later, I added another 20k for an editor (which I wrote in a week), but otherwise, it was the same book it is now.

I didn’t write book 2 until six years and six books later, hence the jump in quality. That one took me three months to write, if you don’t count the five chapters I wrote before that but then couldn’t work on for, like, a year due to illness and having, like, no words in my brain. Despite getting temporarily better enough to work on the book, it didn’t last, and I went back to being blank and empty.

(If you’re wondering, I have an autoimmune disease–Hashimoto’s–and adrenal fatigue, which it turns out were caused by crazy severe food allergies. Mostly gluten. And grains. I know what you’re thinking, but gluten is seriously bad news and it sucked out my soul like a Dementor. It turns out autoimmune disease in general is caused by food allergies (mostly gluten, grains, and dairy), so if you have one, please Google the Autoimmune Protocol–it saved my life.)

Somehow I wrote book 3 while being blank and empty. Sometimes my brain would just go blank in the middle of a sentence, and I would have absolutely no idea what words to put next, and I’d have to walk away from it for a couple weeks until I could start thinking of words again. This forced start-and-stop method was really hard, and I don’t think I can express how frustrating it was. Once I finally started healing, I also realized how dampened my emotions were at the time. It’s not exactly that I couldn’t feel feelings… but I kind of couldn’t feel feelings. And yet somehow I wrote a book full of feelings. Just like how I wrote a book full of thoughts and words when my brain was very low on them. I honestly don’t know how I managed to write that book, though I know it was mostly done in little chunks over two years, so I guess that’s how, but still. The more I heal and the better I get, the more I look back and think, WTF? How in the hell did I manage to write any of that, let alone a whole book?

Book 4 took me a year and half, but I wrote most of it in the last six months. Coincidentally when I had some health breakthroughs and started feeling better. (Crazy, right?) It, too, was written in starts and stops and little chunks, though there were less starts and stops and the chunks were bigger, and my brain stopped crapping out in the middle of sentences. I still have trouble writing for long periods of time, and sometimes I hit my limit way earlier than I would like, but overall it’s getting easier. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to write a book in a 28-day whirlwind again (though I wasn’t exactly healthy then, either, it just wasn’t as bad yet, so who knows?). I think these books have gotten too complicated for that, though I’d settle for a three-month writing binge, or maybe even a six-month writing binge, or maybe even a “just being able to write steadily in general” streak.

Anyway, I can’t believe I’ve been writing Renegade X books for ten years. In that time, only a year and a half has gone by for the characters. At this rate, even if I lived to be 100–and kept writing Renegade X books at the same pace the whole time–Damien would never be older than 27. How bizarre is that? Not that that’s how books work, and not that I’m saying that’s how it’s going to go. I’m just saying the time difference between my life and theirs is very different.

Okay, so, apparently the newsletter signup on the website was kind of a piece of crap and wasn’t working right. Or at least the WordPress plugin wasn’t working. I switched it out for an embedded form instead, and it seems to be okay now. When you sign up, you’ll get an email asking you to confirm your subscription, and then after you confirm, you’ll get another email with the link to Damien Locke’s Guide to Golden City, which is a downloadable 18-page PDF full of funny anecdotes and snarky conversations between Damien and Riley.

If you signed up for the newsletter and didn’t get your copy of the guide, I just sent out a newsletter with a link, so you should have it now.

If you sign up for the newsletter after reading this and it still craps out and doesn’t send you anything or do what it’s supposed to, please email me at campchelsea@gmail.com so I can fix it and send you your copy. But, like, hopefully it’s working now and won’t screw up.

For those of you who have been waiting, The Torment of Renegade X is now out in paperback! (It’s been up for a few days, but they haven’t merged the listing yet with the ebook, so I didn’t notice. Oops.)

And I have some good news and some bad news about the cover for book 4.  The bad news is, Raul Allen is no longer going to be able to do the covers for the series, which is unfortunate, since I know many of us loved his covers and were looking forward to the new one. But the good news is that I have an amazing new cover artist lined up, and since I’m switching to photomanipulation covers (instead of the current covers, which are illustrated), this means it will also be done much sooner, and everyone can look forward to reading Phobia in mid August. Maybe even more like early August. (I so can’t wait for everyone to read this book. I love it so much, and it meant so much to me while I was working on it, and now you guys are finally going to be able to read it, too.)

I will eventually have all the covers redone to match the new style (eventually as in sometime this fall), and the new cover style will mean less delays and faster publication timelines in the future.

The next installment in the Renegade X saga is here!!! The Torment of Renegade X is a 94-page novella that takes place between books 3 and 4, and the ebook is available now with the print version coming very soon (should be within the next week).

The annual first-year camping trip is supposed to be the bonding experience of a lifetime. At least, it is as long as you’re not the only half villain going to an all-hero school. Damien knows he’s more likely to make new enemies than new friends on this trip, and he’s dreading spending a week in the woods with people who hate him. But he also knows that the school and his classmates would love nothing more than for him to stay home, and he’s not going to give them the satisfaction.

 

At camp, his cabin mates turn out to be douchebags—big surprise—but what Damien wasn’t counting on is that they not only hate him, but they have powers they can use on him without getting caught. Which they do. A lot. And Damien can’t fight back without risking getting kicked out of camp, if not out of school completely. As the week drags on and Damien’s life becomes a living hell, he starts to question whether it’s worth putting up with all this just to prove a point or if he should call it quits and go home. But going home means giving in, and if Damien wants to show his cabin mates that they can’t win, he’ll need to pull himself together and figure out a way to get revenge without using his powers.

First things first, The Phobia of Renegade X, book 4 in the Renegade X series, is complete! It finished at 116k, which is just shy of book 3’s 118k. I’m hoping to have it out by the end of August, but that will depend on when the cover art is finished, so it might be more like early September.

In the meantime, I’m writing another novella, this one set between books 3 and 4. So you won’t have to read it to read book 4, but it is technically what comes next. It’s called The Torment of Renegade X and is about Damien and Riley (and Amelia) spending a mandatory week at superhero camp, much to Damien’s dismay. My goal is to have it out by the end of this month, so expect that soon!

And I set up the newsletter so that new subscribers now get a copy of Damien Locke’s Guide to Golden City, a fun travel guide I originally wrote as part of the Kickstarter for book 3.  It’s 18 pages of all-new anecdotes with snarky commentary between Damien and Riley, along with a few drawings. If you’d like to get a copy, there’s a subscription form in the  upper left of the sidebar (though if you’re reading this from a different site, go to www.chelseamcampbell.com first), and you can unsubscribe at any time. (I am totally that person who subscribes for the free gift and then immediately cancels, so who am I to judge?) If you’re already a subscriber, I’ve sent out a newsletter with a link to the file, so it should show up in your inbox very soon!

And if you’re a Dragonbound fan, yes, there will be more Dragonbound! It’s too early for me to promise any dates (I mean, I’d like to, but I’m always wrong, so maybe it’s better if I don’t), but for now just know that I’m working on it and you will have more Virginia and Amelrik. :)

Oh, and since I’m covering all the bases here, yes, there will be more audiobooks. I’m hoping to get at least one Renegade X audiobook out next February, but this is super tentative right now because it depends on some factors I don’t really have control of. BUT if you are one of the people waiting for them, take heart, because the audiobooks are very important to me, too, and more will be coming.

The Kickstarter for book 4 is now FUNDED! That means that I will for sure be able to publish The Phobia of Renegade X, and it will have cover art by Raul Allen, who did the gorgeous wrap covers for books 1-3. A HUGE THANKS goes out to everyone who’s pledged already, and to anyone who’s helped spread the word about the campaign. I couldn’t do this without you guys, and I’m so excited that this book is going to be a reality and that I’m going to get to share it with all of you!

And there are still FOUR DAYS left to go, so if you haven’t pledged, there’s still time to get your early bird copy of Phobia, or a signed book, or the superhero definition mug! (Actually, those should both be “and/or” instead of just “or,” because the signed books and the mug all come with the early bird copy, but I thought “and/or” didn’t look as cool. But still, you know what I mean.) Backers also get their superhero or supervillain name listed in the back of the book, so if you’ve always wondered what the Citizens of Golden City section was about or wanted to be part of it, now’s your chance.

The Kickstarter for The Phobia of Renegade X is 91% funded, and with only 8 days left to go, we’re in the home stretch! Help make the next installment in the Renegade X saga a reality and get to read it before anyone else!

Thanks to an AMAZING first couple days, the Kickstarter for The Phobia of Renegade X is already at 60%! And there are still 25 days to go!

If the campaign gets funded with time leftover, I’ll do stretch goals aimed at getting the next audiobook done again (crossing my fingers for it) like I did last time.

Some updates about the Kickstarter:

• I added a MUG AND EBOOKS tier for people who just want to get the superhero definition mug and the ebooks.
• There are 2 NAME A CHARACTER incentives left and 1 ULTIMATE NAME A CHARACTER (where you get to name a character, and you get hardback copies of all four books, and a paperback copy of the novella, and the superhero definition mug). If you’ve ever wanted to be able to open a Renegade X book, point to a character’s name, and say, “That’s me!” then this is your chance.

A huge thanks to everyone who’s pledged so far! I wouldn’t be able to do this without you guys.