I’m happy and excited to announce that the re-release of Under Siege, book four in The Becoming Series, is now available from all major ebook retailers!
What’s Under Siege about? Well, let me tell you!
It has been almost two years since the Michaluk virus outbreak began, and Kimberly Gellar has helped her newfound friends establish Woodside, a walled-in community of survivors in South Carolina, led by a committee of the best, brightest, and most heroic among them. But underneath the veneer of simplicity that their day-to-day lives become, not all is as it seems. Dr. Derek Rivers, a former CDC scientist, has created the most hopeful version of a cure for the virus and has tested it on a single subject, who promptly begins showing strange and concerning side effects.
After the members of a supply run bring back a set of twin survivors they’ve rescued, a horde of infected follows them back to Woodside. Within hours, the community is besieged by the infected. Desperate to get the potential cure out of their safe haven before the infected get in, Kimberly smuggles it out of Woodside to search for a still-operational CDC facility with only one person to guide and protect her.
As the community collapses and the lives of the survivors are threatened, can Kimberly get the cure to where it can do some good, and can she get help to Woodside before the friends she left behind end up dead at the hands of the infected after nearly two years of survival?
Under Siege is available at all major ebook retailers, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Google Play, and Kobo! You can check out the book’s page here on my website and go order your copy today by clicking right here!
And if you haven’t read the rest of the series yet, you can pick up your copy of The Becoming, the first book in the series, for FREE from all major ebook retailers! So click here to pick it up and get caught up on the epic story of a group of survivors in the midst of a zombie pandemic!
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As a somewhat side note, those of you who have read this series before may discover that there have been only minimal changes to this book comparable to the original release. There are actually several reasons for this. First of all, this book–out of all of them–is probably the most tightly plotted book I’ve ever written. It was around the time that I started working on this book that I discovered Larry Brooks’s Story Engineering, and being the eager writer who had learned something new that I was, I ended up using the “formula,” so to speak, that he presents in his book to plot out the novel. The end result of that is that there really weren’t any extraneous scenes that got cut–because I knew exactly what I was going to write and where it was going to be. I have a side novella about the twins that I had begun writing around the same time and never finished, but I ended up deciding to not incorporate that into Under Siege for one main reason: there was nowhere to insert the scenes because of the second reason I didn’t really add anything new to the book. And that second reason is that this entire novel only takes place over the span of about a day and a half.
Going through and doing rewrites on these books has made me realize how sprawling most of the books are. The first half of the first book takes place over the span of a number of days, hopping between the different characters in the “cast” to show what they went through and how they all ended up coming together. Then there’s a time jump of about a month between the first and second halves of that novel, and the second half takes place over the span of about five or six days. After book one, there’s a massive time jump of about a year, and then Ground Zero takes place across slightly more than a week. Then there’s another month gap between books two and three, and book three takes place, again, in a reasonably compressed timeframe.
Under Siege, though…that timeframe is probably the shortest out of the entire series, looking back at it. I didn’t realize just how short the timeline was for that book. A day and a half. Literally, everything that happens in that book takes place in approximately a day and a half. So there just wasn’t anywhere to even consider adding anything–there just wasn’t time in the characters’ world. And I think, too, that’s part of why this book is the shortest book in the entire series (though it’s still well into novel length!).
That’s not to say I didn’t change anything in the book. There’s been some tightening and fine-tuning, dropping little seeds of foreshadowing for both book five and for the upcoming never-before-released novel(s) in the series that will hinge very heavily on Ethan and what’s going on with him. And I just finished re-reading book five on my Kindle to get a feel for the book again, because I honestly haven’t even looked at it since something like a year before it was originally published by Permuted Press in 2015, and I already see a lot of things that are going to get changed and moved around and adjusted to fit the plans for book six, which I’m angling to have out by December, if all goes according to plan (I have another book I have to finish between book five and book six in my other series first).
So if you’re an older reader who’s read the old version of the book, don’t be discouraged if you think nothing has changed in this book. It’s the little changes that I’ve made that are going to wind up making a huge difference for future books in the series!