shooting from the hip

Barriers in Self-Pub

Well, I ranted so hard yesterday my site temporarily crashed and my mentions are a mess. I regret nothing; it had to be said and I said it.

Someone took minor exception to me remarking that the barriers to entry in self-pub can be prohibitive (though not nearly so much as trad), so I thought I’d start Monday with a few remarks in that direction. Now, that person also made an excellent point that barriers to success are not the same as barriers to entry, and though I think that’s a bit of hair-splitting it’s also undeniably correct. The fact remains that even self-publishing requires tools and know-how, and those tools and know-how are neither common nor universal. Let’s jump right in.

An internet connection. This is so simple it’s often overlooked, but as I have been saying since the early naughts: The internet is not ubiquitous, it just feels like that way when you’re on it. Sure, you can get on wi-fi in coffee shops and libraries if you don’t have home connection, there’s still swathes of the country using dial-up, or you could do everything over mobile data. But uploading a manuscript (or a corrected manuscript) to your distribution platform of choice can get a bit dodgy with dial-up or mobile data, and the time investment of traveling to wherever you can find wi-fi is time that could be spent writing if one had access at home.

Hardware. Believe it or not, some people are too poor for desktops or even secondhand laptops. There are smartphones, of course, and where there’s a will there’s a way–but just think about the brute work of typing 50-60k words for a novel into a smartphone, and let’s not even talk about revisions. You could write longhand and just type the final draft in, I suppose, but again…let’s not even talk about revisions.

Software. Sure, you can use an open-source rich text editor for your drafting and let KDP or D2D format an exported Word doc for you, then slap an MS Paint cover on it. That’s absolutely one way to do it, yep, and the thought of trying it that way is…daunting, to say the least. Yes, there’s Scrivener and it’ll output an epub for you, but doing it that way presupposes you have access to Scrivener as a tool and also the understanding/knowledge of how to get it to compile in that format, then there’s getting an open-source program to proof the result in (say, reading the epub in Calibre and making correction notes in longhand, then updating the Scrivener file and recompiling) and that brings us to another barrier. Right now I use Scrivener for writing and revising, MSWord and Goodnotes for CEs/proofing, Vellum for formatting–and each of those programs required an initial investment of moolah plus an ongoing investment in skill, labor, and updates. Free does not necessarily mean good or labor-saving.

Knowledge. This is a HUGE one. I came to self-publishing already knowing certain basics–editing best practices, proofreader strategies, word processing software shortcuts and formatting foibles, a bit about distribution, big scams to avoid, and most importantly, where to look for other information. This last bit is a skill so basic to certain levels of privilege it can be almost invisible to those who possess it. It’s not about knowing what to do, it’s about knowing where to find a reputable bit of advice that will tell one what to do. By the time I started seriously getting into self-pub I had industry peers I could tap when I had questions as well as access to proven sources of good internet information. (And that was decades ago, so it was uncontaminated by “AI”.) Knowing, for example, that a certain distributor uses Ingram Spark instead of Lightning Source for their back-end POD is useful and necessary, but figuring out that’s something you need to know takes effort and experience.

Time. If you’re working two or three jobs to just barely make rent on a place shared with extended family (born or chosen), time to write, revise, edit, copyedit, proof, find cover art, figure out distribution and pricing, schedule releases, and market is at a premium, or perhaps impossible to find. Even time to research what the latest scams are so you don’t fall prey to grifters is an investment that might not be feasible. This leads into discussion of another barrier…

Energy. Ideally, publishers are supposed to do two things: Provide necessary quality control services (editing, copyediting, proofing, cover art) at economy of scale; and handle distribution/marketing with both economy of scale and pooled resources. Paying a publisher to deal with that stuff frees up time and energy for a writer to do the most important thing–no, not BookTok, for God’s sake, but write. If you already have a dayjob, childcare, and housing instability (or any combination of the above), or if your daily spoons are eaten by microaggressions or disability, a publisher leasing rights to your work could be the thing that allows you to produce any work at all. In self-publishing, you are responsible for not just the writing but the quality control, cover, distribution, marketing–the whole enchilada. Sure, you can skimp on quality control, and that feeds into barrier to success instead of entry, but if the name of the game is to get your work in front of people, well, you kind of want it to look good enough for them to actually read it and come back for more, right? Right?

Now, you might be saying these are barriers to entry in any artistic field or even any industry as a matter of course, and you’d be right. Someone with greater privilege will be able to surmount some of these speed bumps without even noticing they’re there–if one is already on the internet all the damn time, that presumes hardware and a connection, so you’re already two to the good. The barriers to entry in trad publishing are a lot higher, yes, and as I said yesterday, self-pub isn’t quite so difficult but there are still major speedbumps for marginalized folks. While one may start with janky tools and slowly accrete knowledge, skill, and money to invest in better tools while one’s craft and skill also grow, that still requires time and energy one might not possess.

Yes, self-publishing is democratizing to a certain extent. It’s still not a panacea, and not the only answer–though it is a really good one for a whole lotta folks! The barriers in self-pub are lower, not nonexistent. If we threw out the whole tottering, moribund edifice of trad tomorrow, in ten years we’d have it again (albeit maybe not as rot-laced) because pooling resources and economy of scale are both natural human endeavours (part of our heritage as a cooperative species) and a way of surviving under capitalism. A thriving publishing ecosystem would have many big trad houses (not just those counted on one hand), plenty of indie presses, lots of small publishers, and a vibrant section of the industry providing self-pub services at reasonable costs; within all that there would be a multiplicity of ways for marginalized folks to get their stories out without some of the speedbumps above forcing them to give up in exhaustion and despair. Bonus if said thriving pub ecosystem didn’t have to deal with Amazon greedily strangling everything it can while flooding the zone with toxic crap, too.

(While I’m dreaming, I’d love a flock of goats I didn’t have to clean up after. That sounds like fun.)

So, while the person taking exception had a point–especially about the difference between a barrier to success and a barrier to entry–I think a lot of discussion about self-pub falls prey to the bootstrapping myth in both subtle and overt ways, and outright overlooks quite a few things. That being said, I don’t think either that commenter or I are wrong, precisely, we’re just talking at different ends of the problem.

There were other comments I could write blog posts about–I’ve still only scratched the surface of this subject, as someone will make me dismally aware as soon as I press “publish”–but this one’s already long enough and Boxnoggin wants walkies. (Talk about a time investment.)

See you around.

We Gotta Talk About (Trad) Publishing

No, seriously, guys. We really, really need to talk about some of this.

A fellow author forwarded this article to me this morning, and my head nearly exploded–not because of the writer or really any of the information within, because the former is perfectly lovely and the latter a hundred percent accurate. What’s bothering me are implications, to the point that I had to take some time to calm down before attempting to talk about it here.

The TL;DR of the above-linked article is that there’s a mushrooming crop of literary agents jostling into the industry, plus trad editors are so overwhelmed they’re taking 6-12mos to even respond to submissions (when they don’t ghost), so now even reputable agents are asking writers–both new and established–to do all sorts of escalating bullshit (like moodboards, what the ever-loving hell) in order to catch the attention of said overwhelmed editors. The article takes a view along the axes of marginalization keeping a lot of writers out of trad’s pool of accreted resources, which is reasonable, just, and absolutely should be talked about.

But that’s not my lane, since I’m operating from a place of relative privilege. So I’m sticking to other lanes; and boy howdy, there’s no shortage of those.

Publishing has always been an awfully exploitative business. For a long while the level of fuckery in trad pub was low enough for plenty of writers to make a reasonable gamble by submitting by the rules and building a career, but this is no longer the case. Which is not solely or even mostly a function of the pandemic, mind you–the problems were already there well before 2020 rolled around, but conditions since ~2016 have absolutely poured jet fuel on the fire and now we’ve got a multiple-alarm blaze. (You could even trace the problems to Amazon’s strong-arming, or further back to Reagonomics, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post.)

The Big Five/Four have already offloaded the brute work of marketing onto individual authors, hollowing out their own marketing departments in order to line C-suite pockets. Now the crunch has reached editorial departments, where even salaried folk traditionally protected from a lot of industry bullshit are being ruthlessly overworked, underpaid, and just generally mistreated. (No, this is not a “pity the poor editors” screed, just a fact.) Consequently a lot of folk are leaving, and those who remain–or the shiny new ones coming in, thinking they’re going to score a good job–find it impossible to pick up the slack. The article linked above is absolutely correct that editors at the big houses are now being used as draft-horse project managers, which does not work with novels or nonfiction books. It just…doesn’t.

The article is also absolutely correct that there is a glut of “literary agents” right now, though I’m not certain it’s as a result of the pandemic giving people “time to write”. The further fact that literary agents are wholly unregulated remains as well. A whole lot of “agents” hanging out their shingle might not know the industry or have usable reputation or connections–that’s a charitable way of putting it–and as in any unregulated field there’s a whole lotta grifters out there too. This compounds the problem of exploitation and also makes the burden on editors that much heavier.

Here’s the thing: Trad publishing is not only expecting authors to write the damn book and wait to find a reputable agent (one should do one’s due diligence in that area as a matter of course), but also expecting a writer to wait half a year to a whole year for an editor to even look at the work, and then expecting us to do all the marketing as well?

What precisely are we paying trad publishers a percentage for, then? Cover art, when multibillion-dollar trad houses are using plagiarism machines to make the covers for even hotly anticipated titles? Marketing, which we’re supposed to do ourselves? Editorial services and support, from editors so overworked it takes them a year to answer emails? Really?

Really?

An agent gets a percentage of work sold, so it’s in their interests to find a way through the tangle. But is that way forcing the author to do up fucking moodboards or audio, or other labor-intensive gewgaws? Seriously, what the hell is this nonsense? We’re supposed to do the agent’s job as well as the editor’s and the marketing department’s, in return for…what, exactly?

This isn’t really to knock agents; the reputable ones are just as baffled as their authors. One could make the case that they honestly mean well when telling authors to add these bells and whistles in order to attempt enticing some overworked editor (who might hit burnout and leave next month, orphaning an entire slew of works both debut and midlist) to shuffle a submission to the top of the inbox. And it’s not even to really knock plenty of editors, who get into the job because they love literature and want to make a difference.

But if an editor is so overworked they literally can’t answer subs from even well-known, reputable agents with proven authors in their stable, how in God’s name are they supposed to be providing the editorial care and in-house advocacy required by the books they do end up buying?

The answer is simple: They can’t. Trad publishing is literally failing at doing its job. A lot of people, for various reasons both self-serving and otherwise, have accused trad of simply being an entitled gatekeeping mechanism; even a stopped clock is right twice a day, as the saying goes, and honestly it’s starting to look like the urge for infinite exploitation, Amazon-style, has turned trad pub into the nightmare it was accused, by envious dickwads, of being.

I just keep thinking, what precisely are authors paying for when these companies literally will not or cannot do their fucking jobs?

No, really, what are we supposed to grant rights to big publishing houses for nowadays? Editing, from folks so overwhelmed they can’t even answer their email? Cover art, when they’re making it clear they want fuck over and steal from our visual artist pals even more than from writers? Marketing, when we’re expected to do it ourselves, and then blamed when we don’t have the reach of multibillion-dollar corporations? Industry knowledge, when they’re literally worshipping at the altar of TikTok and Goodreads, neither of which have even a Magic 8-Ball’s accuracy? It certainly can’t be prestige; seriously, is there any of that left?

It’s beginning to look like the barriers to entry in self-pub are a lot easier to surmount for even the most marginalized of writers. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still fairly prohibitive there, in a lot of respects–just a lot less prohibitive than this bloody nonsense.

The Big Five/Four appear to be rotting in tar pits; indie or small presses who have good business hygiene and treat their authors well are positioned beautifully to grab market share when the avalanche of market correction hits. One supposes the cycle will start all over again, then–from an original ground polluted almost past bearing by both Amazon’s predatory practices and the ecology-wrecking plagiarism machines, true, but at least a few of us might get some breathing room.

How many great stories and authors are we going to lose before that happens, though, and when said correction hits? Even more than we’re losing now because the industry is full of grifters calling themselves agents, reputable agents who can’t get overworked editors to look at anything, editors hollowed out by burnout so badly that it takes them half a year (or a full year) to respond to subs if they respond at all, editors so overwhelmed they can’t provide proper editing or in-house support for what books do manage to be sold, a complete lack of marketing support, TikTok and Goodreads being treated as industry oracles, hush-hush meetings where publishing execs are attempting to figure out how to replace pesky human writers who expect to be paid with hallucinating plagiarism machines (oh yeah, those screenshots are something, indeed), cover art made by hallucinating DALL-E and Midjourney, and titles poisoned by SEO delirium?

This is wild. This is bizarre even by publishing standards, and that’s saying something. What, exactly, are the authors–the ones providing the stuff this industry literally cannot run without, mind you, the human beings producing the books and stories even the corporate plagiarism machines cannot function without–paying for here? What services are being rendered, what benefits are authors getting by granting rights and percentages to these companies?

No wonder so many established midlisters are making the move to self-pub; no wonder the number of hybrid authors is at an all-time high. I can only see this trend accelerating, especially since the tools for self-pub have been around for awhile now and there’s a lot of free guides about how to do it–if you can find a search engine that isn’t serving up gobs of “AI” horseshite, that is. (I like DuckDuckGo, myself.)

Moodboards. For Chrissake. I just…I can’t even. Moodboards. What a time to be alive, and in publishing. I just keep coming back to that one simple question, so I’ll repeat it a final time before going to do my chores.

What, precisely, are we paying these companies for?

Back In (Oven) Business

My kingdom for a filter…

Since several of you have asked, this is what an oven vent filter looks like! The filter itself is the honeycomb-looking thing; it’s made of rough ceramic and so far as I can tell functions a bit like a smokescrubber, catching particles. An oven needs a vent for proper heat circulation, and that vent needs a filter so cooking smoke doesn’t taint the food–even a small amount can ruin a whole meal. You can use your oven without the filter in the vent…but I wouldn’t recommend it for stuff that could produce even a little smoke. (Like bacon. Mmmm, bacon.)

We found out we needed a new filter as the Princess was baking a cake, when the old one literally fell out. The vent tube itself is held by a couple screws and that flared lip–in this picture the tube itself is upside down, it’s supposed to be fixed to the roof of the oven interior. There are ways to get the filter back in if it’s just cracked, but unfortunately ours was too broken by its trip through the wire racks. So a whole new vent tube/filter was necessary; there are tabs on the inside that hold the ceramic disc and, wouldn’t you know, a new disc wouldn’t fit.

Cue about two hours’ worth of weeding through useless AI-tainted swamps before finally finding out what precisely we needed, then a trip to the manufacturer’s website for the precise part number and ordering info, another half-hour of drilling through that mess, and finally I found the part number…only to discover it was out of stock. A month and a half later it was finally back in stock, and it took another long while to be shipped.

Guess how long it took to take the old vent tube out and put the shiny new one in? Less than seven minutes. It would’ve been less than five if I’d been able to take the oven door off like I once saw the appliance repairman do, but I felt like that was just a way to create more problems. And now the oven is back to full use.

I absolutely needed the dopamine hit from this victory; it’s been a heckuva week. And I still have a character to kill in the Sekrit Projekt today–it would’ve been yesterday, but so much intervened. And to be honest I wasn’t ready to let go. This particular fictional person deserves better than what they’re getting; sadly, that’s life. Even in fiction.

See you next week, my dears.

Morning, Chopped

We made appointments, answered questions, filled out all the paperwork online, got out the door Tuesday morning…and an officious Walgreens “pharmacy tech” refused our entire family the Covid vaccine we qualify for (since we haven’t been boosted since 2022). Which was upsetting in the extreme–I could not sleep the night after, heartsick and vexed. I’m hearing anecdotally that this is happening to a lot of eligible people, being refused lifesaving and disability-fighting vaccines by pharmacists using “religion” as an excuse or who seem genuinely unaware of CDC guidelines and best practices. It’s fucking maddening. Perhaps the reason vaccine uptake is “low” is because our public health infrastructure has completely failed, mostly due to business interests gutting it because they want the serf class–no matter how sick or disabled–back at the mill for exploiting.

Anyway, I’ve filed complaints and we’re making arrangements to go elsewhere. Plus, I’ll never step in another Walgreens again so long as I live. And that’s all I’ve to say about that, because most of what I’d add is unrepeatable blue words.

I don’t know how long it will last, but it looks like the Gallow & Ragged trilogy is discounted in ebook. (I wish I were alerted to these things more consistently.) The first volume, Trailer Park Fae, is $2.99 for Kindle–again, I don’t know for how long, but I thought I’d mention it.

I finished Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad and it was marvelous. She makes the Greek sing through the English and her notes are a delight. Next up is her Odyssey translation. I am smacking my lips in anticipation–after a moment spent with Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human, which I first read in a Junji Ito adaptation.

I was in bed this morning with the Dazai as Boxnoggin got his cuddles, and happened across a particular passage where the protagonist talks about how, when people say, “Society won’t stand for it…” what they really mean is “I won’t stand for it.” If someone says, “Society will ostracize you,” what they really mean is, “I will ostracize you.” The force of the passage, addressing a “you” since the book’s in first person, was like a thunderclap. I had to set the book down and think about things for a bit–which Boxnoggin adored since it meant chest-skritches, always a favorite after a long night spent snoring in comfort.

Of course the protagonist is a bit tiresome, but the feeling Dazai describes of being an imposter in one’s own life, of clowning to hold back the despair, of utter alienation beginning in childhood, is extremely familiar. I sought out the book after Ito’s adaptation because of that definite, echoing familiarity–nausea in the Sartre sense, I’d call it. I’ve the urge to watch Breathless afterward, just to see if the existentialist throughlines I’m seeing hold.

It’s good to have some bandwidth for reading again; not-reading is almost as uncomfortable as not-writing. For a short awful while I was so emotionally and physically exhausted by the struggle around a certain series I couldn’t manage more than a paragraph before passing out at night; thankfully, the commitment to protecting the work (and myself) in this Year of the Real is paying off by granting me a little breathing room. Funny how that works out, ennit–when one starts enforcing one’s boundaries, one finds out rather quickly who was taking one’s kindness for weakness, and one acquires far more energy to spend on one’s own affairs.

It’s been a chopped-up sort of morning, as you can see by the separators. I’m about to begin another push to get the Sekrit Projekt past the point of no return, where its own momentum will take it over the finish line…but it’s rough, and various other considerations might intrude. The month of April’s going to hit like a freight train, since I’m rather behind, what with so much time eaten up by health concerns and struggling to get That Particular Series born. At least the stress nausea (I’m detecting a theme, and a rather unpleasant one at that) is receding bit by bit.

It’s not the end of the battle, but I can see it from here. And that is a welcome development indeed, my friends. The relief is damn near depthless.

Stubbornness Roll

Roadtrip Z

I only got 3k words on the Sekrit Projekt yesterday, but on the other hand I tested a butter chicken recipe for the Instant Pot and it turned out well. With a few tweaks it’ll be one of our go-to dinners–not too often, because that’s a lot of butter and heavy cream, but the kids can now request it as a fave.

The Roadtrip Z sale is going on today and tomorrow; Season 1 is $.99USD in ebook and the rest are deeply discounted. There are plenty of other price drops, all listed on the Monthly Sales page. (Don’t forget to check the dates!)

I’ve a chance to get a Covid booster today if the stars align, so that’s…not pleasant, but I’m hopeful. I don’t want to die in the hospital drowning in my own sputum, and I also don’t want to roll the dice on lifelong disability. I mask religiously but I can’t really afford the price-gouging for boosters and vaccines, so I’m crossing my fingers and wishing hard. I want to try to get a morning run in as well, in case the booster wallops me tomorrow.

Along with that, there’s an uncomfortable conversation to be had in the Sekrit Projekt, a bit of tweaking on the upcoming serial chapter, a tranche of correspondence (my inbox is a mess, but when is it not?) and Boxnoggin to walk. All these chainsaws to keep juggled, and if I miss a single one it’ll be unpleasant. Good thing my dexterity modifier is sufficient to most disasters, and when it isn’t my stubbornness rolls come into play.

Those tend to be epic indeed. Is stubbornness a constitution roll? (I wish I could still play D&D, I miss it.)

Of course I’d feel a lot better about this if the Sekrit Projekt didn’t have to be so sooper-sekrit, but I simply can’t risk opening the door yet. Protecting the work has its drawbacks as well as benefits; I’m just glad the latter outweigh the former by several orders of magnitude.

Dawn is a thin line of gold in the east, shading up ombre-style through a pale rose, an almost-white, and into the blue of morning fading through Night’s last veil. It’s gorgeous and makes me conscious that I’m about a hundred pages from the end of the Iliad. Patroclus is dead, Achilles is raging, Scamander is about to be heavily inconvenienced, and I’d love to simply polish off the rest of the poem in a blaze of coffee and birdsong. Maybe I can have it as a lunchtime reward, if I get the booster and clear a bit of wordcount.

Something to look forward to on a Tuesday, at least. Away I go, juggling roaring implements of destruction. At least I’m not on a unicycle; that would be concerning…

Monday, Avec Subtext

Recently, I was hanging out in my Discord server and someone asked, “How much thought do you give to the subtext of your novels? (With the knowledge that ~75% of people are there for a plot and won’t pick up on the subtext)”? Which was super interesting and I typed up a long reply, but the question’s been bouncing around in my head since.

I don’t think most people are reading for plot. I think most people are reading for an experience, an exercise in empathy; plot is often a component of that, and characterization is a very important overriding factor as well. But subtext, hmm. My answer boiled down to, “I don’t think about it at all in the zero and first draft. If there’s subtext, I only recognize it in revision–and most of the time the editor sees it, I don’t.”

A story is a living, breathing organic thing for me. In the zero and first draft my concern is only getting the damn thing out whole and undamaged as possible. Any subtext happens almost despite the writer; the story itself chooses what it’s about and its undercurrents. This is not an abdication of responsibility, just a feature of how creativity often works; many’s the time an editor has said, “I love how you put in X as a theme/subtext,” and I’ll go all shifty-eyed and reply, “Yes, haha, absolutely!” before digging frantically in a former draft to find out what the hell.

When I write, I’m concerned almost entirely with just getting the damn thing finished in as undamaged a fashion as possible, getting myself out of the way so the story can come through. Anything else is the Muse’s concern and purview, not mine.

Now, in revision, once I’m alerted to themes or subtexts (which is part of the advantages and services an effective editor provides), I made decisions about highlighting or redirecting, accentuating or burying. And of course, other writers no doubt have different processes; I’m sure there are those who naturally think about and handle the subtext as they’re drafting or even while outlining. So this is not a one-size-fits-all answer by any means, and if you have a different experience while building your own stories, awesome! Go with it. Do what works for you. That’s the entire point.

Moving on! The time change (Daylight Savings, for the curious) is highly unpleasant, as usual. There is a persistent myth that it was instituted for agricultural reasons, like summer vacations in American public schooling, but that just ain’t so. Factory owners wanted to squeeze more productivity out of their caged employees, so the time change was instituted, and proved a little profitable so there’s a great deal of resistance to scrapping the whole thing. It’s all about control and a few more cents squeezed from workers, like so much else. It’s deeply unpleasant and the sooner it’s abolished the better.

…I could also be cranky because the caffeine hasn’t hit yet and there’s a whole lot to do today. That’s a distinct possibility.

Said coffee has been finished but Boxnoggin hasn’t stirred from his first daily nap yet. He was thrilled to have dinner “early” yesterday, even though he’s largely a social eater and sometimes refuses his kibble unless someone will sit at the table and pretend to be snacking as well. Of all our dogs he’s the one who handles the time change best–though he does start lobbying for dinner an hour before the official moment–more out of duty than anything else, I think. He appears utterly convinced the humans will forget to eat if not reminded by their faithful canine supervisor.

Of course, going outside for his first bathroom break happened in predawn darkness, which meant Deathwish BunBun appeared in the ferns along the back fence, giving me a filthy look for invading what he considers as his domain. Amazingly, Boxnoggin was too concerned with peeing and getting back inside to the warm bed to even notice the snackable bit of rodentia nearby, a mercy I am devoutly grateful for.

I love this dog; also, “smart” and “observant” are two deeply inaccurate descriptors for him. He is loving, committed, sometimes cunning, goofy, and energetic, and it’s enough.

Onward to Monday. I’m in a bit of a mood, and unwilling to sugarcoat much if at all today. It’s oddly liberating, like trimming my own hair–another thing which happened this weekend, and it went as well as can be expected. The split ends are gone, I can throw it in a braid for sleep or exercise, and when it warms up a little more the bees will be able to hitch a ride. More doesn’t really concern me at this point.

I’ve got subtexting to do, after all.

Lightning, Once, Enough

Rolled out of bed to find that the Moka pot had been prepped on the stove for me, and one of my children (who had kindly set that up for their poor caffeine-dependent mother) was absolutely bursting to tell me all the news. Apparently that plagiarist Somerton is back at it with a fresh empathy-free nopology1, testing the waters to gain some engagement dollars from hatewatchers; I am continually amazed at the rinse-and-repeat cycles granted certain shameless narcissists.

Yesterday was a bit of a wash. I got a lot of administrivia handled, including things that couldn’t be done on the weekend, but that bled off the force I needed to get certain other things moving along. As a result, the writing part of the day felt like clawing my way out of Sarlaac pit. Both the serial and the Sekrit Projekt are chonky bois2 and being past the point of shiny-and-new makes for a lot of current to swim against, even without the Sisyphean emotional labor on the Sekrit. I want to add a third project to make them jealous, but so much of my energy is spent pushing against the resistance of previous damage there’s not a single leftover erg. Maybe that’ll change when edits for Chained Knight drop and I take time to do revisions on that book and Gamble.

At the very least I’ll be using different mental muscles. Sometimes that’s as good as a rest.

The promo experiment over the weekend went well, too. There’ll be a second experiment next month, and if that goes well I’ll consider recommending the particular promo platform to others. I was amused (and touched) so many folk decided any book capable of garnering that particular “fuck God” review was worth picking up for four bucks and giving a whirl; thank you all. I hope you like it.

I wrote Moon’s Knight during lockdown, in something of a fugue state. And I wasn’t going to publish it, but the howls of protest from my beta readers–who received an early draft on the theory that it might help them escape their own stress during that time–convinced me otherwise. There are whole passages I got to revision on and thought, whoever wrote this sounds like me, makes the choices I would…but I have no memory of this place. It was a very Gandalf set of moments, and I was quite jumpy looking for the Balrog.3

Chained Knight will be out later this year–I already have the cover, it’s a real beaut–and maybe I’ll write the third Tale of the Underdark next winter. I know precisely what happens and how it closes the circle. Of course, these books are variations on a theme rather than a proper series, as I’ve said before. If Moorcock could do it with a certain albino Melnibonean, why can’t I with a riff on something else? It’s the sort of project I wouldn’t be able to do without self-publishing technology and the experience garnered over the last couple decades, so at least I can feel good about that. Even if nobody ends up liking these books, I’ll be happy.

Of course, the response to Moon’s Knight has been overwhelmingly positive, notwithstanding that one hilarious “fuck God” review. Which, again, was absolutely priceless promo, the likes of which I might not ever see again. Ah well, hit by lightning once is enough. The amusement itself is worth the price of admission.

Today is for a meeting of clan-lords during which a certain sellsword receives what is, to her, very bad news, and a scene during which two prisoners somewhat bond over their fate. It’s the latter I’m looking forward to most, since it presents a chance to invert quite a few tropes. Turning such things inside out pleases me mightily, and honestly I doubted I’d get to ever write this particular scene. There have been many dark nights of the soul lately, only a few shafts of random light poking through to accentuate just how hopeless I’ve been feeling.

Quite frankly, it’s been awful. Maybe some of that is breaking up, though. Hand over hand, clinging to a rope made of stories, I keep climbing–and throwing out ropes of my own for others in different pits. It’s a life’s work and as I get older it seems more and more inevitable; I was always going to end up here, and I largely don’t mind. Weaving a net to keep others from the abyss keeps me occupied enough to struggle upward another few handholds.

And now it’s time for breakfast. Boxnoggin was an absolute fur-covered brat during yesterday’s walkies. He’s simply in that part of recovery, which means I need to be even more vigilant about making sure he doesn’t re-injure himself–a thankless task, to be sure, but a necessary one. I just heard him shake his collar as I typed that last sentence, so off I go.

Happy Tuesday, my beloveds. Let’s keep hauling ourselves upward.