Brennan Smith

Iron Empire has now sold copies in Canada, the US, the UK, Germany, France and Australia!
          
          Thank you all!

Big things are coming before the end of the year! 
          I've got some long-term plans for the future of the Iron Empire Saga, and it starts with an official account.
          
          I'm now on Instagram as @ironempiresaga!
          
          If you'd like, follow me there for more content, some sneak peaks and a couple other surprises I can't talk about yet. :-)
          
          (I hope this link works but I have no way to be sure until I post, otherwise just search my @)
          
          https://www.instagram.com/invites/contact/?igsh=un8xxvxry9mn&utm_content=irngf9v

I just don't get it, Wattpad.
          
          M-dashes show up in the preview version of a chapter. They show up in comments. They appear everywhere in this app, EXCEPT in a posted chapter. 
          
          I love m-dashes. I use them a lot. But automatically replacing every m-dash with an n-dash is the strangest part of this platform.
          
          My complaint aside, new chapter up. At 5000 words, "Fifteen: Tin Soldiers" is the longest chapter in the Iron Empire Saga thus far, and I'm quite proud of it.
          
          Please try to ignore all the stupid n-dashes that mess with the formatting, I swear to you they were all m-dashes when I wrote it.

60K. 
          
          Sixty thousand lifetime reads on Iron Empire.
          
          If every single reader only spent a single minute of their lives looking at my novel, it would still have been read for more than FORTY-ONE DAYS STRAIGHT.
          
          I'm not going to write a massive thank you, you all know how grateful I am. But truly, thank you all.
          
          Here's to the next forty-one days together.

I've written about 22 chapters of Silver Reign now, with 13 of them posted here on Wattpad so far. Only now that I'm well into the start of the novel's plot do I realize... 
          
          Silver Reign is gonna be a big book.
          
          If you haven't picked up a copy of the print version of Iron Empire (which I highly recommend, available now on Amazon), the actual, physical novel is a whopping 4 cm thick (or 1.5 inches, for the Americans), and sits at seventy-eight chapters.
          
          Silver Reign is already nearing a third of that length in chapters, and there is a LOT more to cover. As I wrote Iron Empire, two thousand words per chapter was often my upper limit... but now I find that three thousand or more seems to be fast becoming the norm for Silver Reign.
          
          They say there are two types of writers: planners, and "pantsers", as in those who write by the seat of their pants. I'm the latter - I vaguely know what's going to occur and I absolutely know how it's going to end, but the process to reach that point just flows, one week at a time.
          
          Like I said, Silver Reign... is gonna be a big book. So big that the print version might have to end up being split in two, yet again.
          
          First the Vanguard plotline had to be pushed to a prequel novel, and now Silver Reign might be broken into two acts... I suppose time will tell.
          
          I've got one heck of a story to tell, and I'm so glad to have everyone along for the ride.
          
          (Also Iron Empire is almost at 60k reads! Wow!)

Silver Reign is back this Friday, resuming it's regular weekly schedule!
          
          I'm gonna be real for a second, though: it's not likely that I can keep this schedule up. As my profile mentions, I'm a mechanical engineering student, and I've just entered my final semester of classes. 
          
          Barring some personal complications I'm working around, in four months I plan to graduate with my bachelor's degree and (finally) complete my education as a certified engineer. However, that means four more months of late nights studying, midterms and exams (weighted waaaaay too much, in my opinion) and the dreaded final capstone project.
          
          Writing throughout that will... not be easy. I've always had an intuition with words, but numbers are far less my style, so every ounce of my time will be needed to earn my degree, sooner or later.
          
          That being said, I plan to continue posting as long as I am able, before I inevitably have to step away for a few weeks. And then, in April, I'll be free and in the workforce for the first time in my life. 
          
          Which is kind of scary, now that I think about it, but a proper 9-5 job will mean I have evenings and weekends dedicated to writing, instead of my current writing setup (hunched over my phone on the city bus to campus, trying to concentrate).
          
          Anyhow, TL;DR? Silver Skies returns this Friday but expect future delays starting at some point before April. 
          
          Oh, and I got offered to join the Wattpad Creators program. I declined, not my style, but neat that I was noticed.

It's done. Steel Skies is now Silver Reign, and the Vanguard chapters of the novel have been separated into their own story.
          
          I plan to carry forward with Silver Reign (the sequel) before circling back to Steel Skies (the prequel). 
          
          This also gives me more opportunity to tell Taewon Park's story, as he is undoubtedly the most important character next to Jackson Quinn.
          
          I have updated the descriptions and information about both novels accordingly.
          
          Happy New Year! 

Heavily debating splitting Steel Skies into two books—a prequel novel following Martin Thorn and the Vanguard squad, which would keep the "Steel Skies" title, and the Saint Corp content with Jackson Quinn would be pushed to a yet-untitled sequel novel.
          
          The problem is that Iron Empire... is a big book. If you own the Amazon copy, you'd see it sits at a whopping 686 pages, and the sequel is going to be even bigger. 
          
          By cramming both plots into one book, I feel like I'm doing a disservice to both, but particularly the Vanguard storyline. A seperate novel would allow both room to breathe, even if the prequel story ended up a much shorter book than the sequel.
          
          I haven't settled on it yet, but that would make the series, chronologically:
          
          Steel Skies (set in the 2050s)
          Iron Empire (set in the 2060s)
          Untitled Sequel (set in the 2060s)
          Dead Metal (set ?? years later, in the 20XXs)
          
          Splitting the books in half would also mean abandoning one storyline for a decent period of time as I work on the other. The prequel storyline sets up massive reveals in the sequel, while the sequel keeps the plot moving forward with Jackson and the characters we know and love.
          
          If anyone has an opinion on this I'd love to hear it. Which story would you prefer to see continued first? Prequel or sequel?

Merry (almost) Christmas and happy holidays!
          
          While Steel Skies is on break until the new year, I couldn't resist writing at least a little bit in my off time.
          
          However, this holiday bonus chapter is for Iron Empire, not Steel Skies—an extremely non-canonical, slightly fourth-wall breaking holiday special featuring the cast of the first book.
          
          After an amazing year learning the ins and outs of self-publishing, this chapter was both a cheeky way for me to poke fun at myself for the various flaws and imperfections that come with publishing solo, and a celebration of everything accomplished.
          
          It may also contain a few teases for the plot of the sequel...
          
          I'm so thankful for the support on this series and can't wait to continue onward with Steel Skies and beyond!
          
          Once again, happy holidays! I'll see you all in 2025 for the next chapter of Steel Skies!

!?!?!? 
          
          The official Wattpad Sci-fi page has just added Iron Empire to their "Dystopocalypse" playlist.
          
          Kind of shocked I was noticed by anything official Wattpad related.
          
          There's... no announcement or anything here, just wanted to brag because that's WILD.