First of all, please just let me say the important thing: I have published a new book.
Fated for Firelizards is a paranormal romance where a gal ends up with a dragon. It’s mostly fun. It’s consciously didactic and radically eco-punk. I fear I’m not putting my best foot forward coming back with something that is so goofy, but hey! I like goofy. I am a goofy person. It’s a fair representation of my interests, just like my doorstopper gothic fantasy literature and my avant garde horror.
Links are here, assuming my websites haven’t exploded from an unfamiliar volume of traffic.
Yay! New book!
I rewarded myself by buying a foot bath massager thingy. I’ve been doing a lot of walks out in ye olde Nevada desert, and I do most work at a standing desk, so my dogs are barking. My feet are tired too.
What was the last book I published?
That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m honestly not sure.
I think it was either one of the Mr. Poe novels, or it was Shatter Cage’s last book, Rise of Heroes. It definitely happened *after* the beginning of the pandemic. But that’s now four years ago. It’s been a while.
I tried to finish the last Lincoln Marshall book, but I’m still only about 1/3 of the way through. That one is difficult. It’s not my favorite series I’ve written, and I was going through weird stuff when I worked on it. Going back brings up a lot of Feelings. A lot of them aren’t great. Plus, it’s a really complex series drawing on many aspects of the Descentverse, which kinda flushed from my brain circa 2020. So I didn’t publish that one.
What did I publish last? Has it really been three years since I put out an entire novel?
It’s not like I’ve been lazing around.
I had a book fail on submission to traditional publishing houses in 2021. Nobody wanted “You’ve Got Nudes,” a small-town romance take on “You’ve Got Mail.” There were a few reasons. For one, having a disabled sex worker as the hero wasn’t a popular idea. For another, there were other You’ve Got Mail takes that were more mainstream, so the market was kinda saturated.
I wrote a book over 300,000 words long, too. I haven’t finished editing it.
And I wrote about 50,000 words of a horror novel.
Plus several other small projects.
Perhaps more time-consuming is the fact I spent the year 2022 in college. I thought it was time to get my degree. Then I remembered I’m really bad at school, and I took a step back in early 2023 to figure out why the hell I can’t grow up and just do it. A whole year of working time! Gone. I really enjoyed it. The cellular biology class was outstanding, and I especially have made use of my art class. But I didn’t finish a degree.
(I’m surely not the only person who feels like it would have been easier and more rewarding to set fire to money rather than fail college.)
The second half of 2023, I spent crocheting and writing movie reviews. Plus that’s when I started on my interactive novel, Fated for Firelizards.
And this year, I got sober-sober. That’s an accomplishment I’m especially proud of.
The industry has changed and so have I.
I’ve kept tabs on the industry, more or less, while I’ve been not-publishing. It’s not been a good few years.
When I left, a lot of unethical practices had well taken hold in the market; the influx of AI-generated everything has only meant more Stuff produced that I can’t compete with.
Surely if I had continued steadily writing my urban fantasy, I would have been fine. But trying to catch back up after seeing such seismic shifts leaves me a little lost.
Nowadays, tons of authors launch on Kickstarter instead. Plus, things like BookFunnel have become major players for distributing books to readers. These require wholly different workflows/skills compared to what I used to do.
The websites involved in publishing have changed a bit, my skills are rusty, and I have to talk myself through a lot of panicky bad feelings that come up whenever I approach the thing. I have a lotta business-related trauma that feels too private to discuss…anywhere, really.
Just publishing Fated for Firelizards has been riddled with technical issues, major and minor. I don’t even know how to reach most of my readers at this point. Stuff has changed so much. Emails have expired. Rules around mass emails have changed. Social media visibility is hard as ever.
And I don’t even have another book queued up to go after this one. I used to just pop ’em out, one after another.
Well, I’m here. I might as well do it anyway.
I always thought I’d get back to publishing novels — not just movie reviews, shitposts, and fanfic — so here I am.
I’ve got more in the pipeline, albeit slowly.
It’s weird to be here. But I am here.
So I guess I’m doing it again.
