Thanks for Reading!
Any support, even just giving these posts a read, is always appreciated.
Recent Updates:
My debut Southern Dark Fantasy novel BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS is officially OUT!
It’s available literally everywhere books are sold. Want my recs?
Get the Ebook here: Campfire
Get Paperback and Hardback here: Bookshop.org
Can’t afford to buy a copy? I’m happy to announce that my book is also available on HOOPLA through your local public library!
I’ve also updated my website to highlight my short fiction! Head on over!
Project Progress:
Alright, finally some real updates to this!
Now that BRN is out, I can focus fully on Book 2. I am about 65% through the rough draft of book 2.
Once I finish the RD of 2, I’ll be setting it aside to rest and editing my Horror Novel Project!
Recent Fascinations: IT’S ALIVE, BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS, OUT NOW!
When I started this newsletter and blog almost two years ago, BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS wasn’t even under that title yet. Now, my debut novel is officially out there. It’s living on the shelf at Lemuria Books in Jackson, MS. It’ll be in other local stores soon. It’s on bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble’s website, it’s in a lot of places, alive and breathing.
Aspiring no more, I am a published novelist now.
It feels strange, not necessarily exciting, but instead more gratifying than I ever imagined. I can still remember being in eighth grade, telling my friends I would be a writer one day. I can remember being a Sophomore in high school, my geometry teacher ripping a page out of my notebook where I was working on what would become my first completed novel draft. She didn’t do it out of any hatefulness, I actually really loved her, but because I was SUPPOSED to be working on an assignment.
The call to write was always too much, always too distracting.
The next year, I would finish another novel draft, a dystopian sci-fi thing where each character was based on someone I knew.
A year later, another.
This became the standard for me, until I slowed down in college, writing only two unedited rough drafts across my seven years of college education. Across the years, a few key people have read these drafts, even that first, horrid thing, but none of them will ever be published. They live instead “in the trunk”, like so many other stories by so many other writers.
All in all, BRN is my fifth completed work, it is the only one I’ve ever seen through to editing, to true completion. The only one strangers have read. It is the book that has made me a novelist in every sense of the word.
It also is the one that tells me, with a degree of absolute certainty, that I can’t rest on my laurels. Already, people have asked me, “So it says ‘book 1’, how many will there really be?”, and already I am having to tell them the truth.
Nine.
The SONG OF CALARINE is conceptualized in my head as a trilogy of trilogies.
The first, showing Sarah’s discovery of the Belhaven and the fight to keep it.
The second showing the gathering of allies for what’s to come.
The third showing the war for Calarine and the fate of the Empire.
These stories, at least in my mind, are not the only ones I have in me, but they are the most important. So, to realize them, I have to remain dedicated. How long before the next one?
Well, I guess the only answer I can give is, as fast as I can manage.
So, I guess I’d better get to work.
Thanks for reading.
