Sarah Silvergrove has spent two years trying to outpace the guilt she carries over the death of a friend. Living as a nomadic traveler and attached to no one, she discovers the Belhaven, a haunting library hidden in the ruins of a long abandoned city. It holds the secrets to commanding the world’s magic, and Sarah, now one of the few magic users not under the control of the struggling empire, sets out to build a new community in hopes of redemption. But when a charismatic traveler arrives and integrates himself into the budding community, Sarah begins to worry that she is destined to fail again. Terrified of the task at hand, but knowing she cannot pass it on, Sarah must decide if she will let her failures define her or if she can defend the library and those who have come to trust in her. Greater mechanisms than her are pulling at the chords of destiny, and her fight for redemption will test everything she thought she knew about herself.
The Song has yet to be Sung.
The time has finally come, the cover is finally here. This beautiful cover was completed by the incredibly talented J.A. Wellings, and I could not be happier with it. It really captures the beauty and the vibes of the story in the absolute best way. So, without further hog waller and waiting around, the Full Paperback Cover of BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS:
Everything about this is fantastic to me, but my favorite part, by far, is the understated silhouette of the trees in the background, all of which are native to Mississippi. Magnolias, Water Oaks, and Loblolly Pines. A natural world so important to the story of BRN.
But wait, that ain’t it, folks, because I have more to reveal.
In addition to the main paperback edition of the book, I will also be releasing a Hardback Special Edition. The dust jacket will be identical to the main cover, but remove it and you get this:
The stark, single color, the mysterious figure. This cover, to me, points ahead, toward what is coming in the series, where BRN heads as the story of Sarah and the Belhaven unfolds. I just love it so much.
I can’t wait to finally hold this book in my hands, to share it with all of you.
Remember, the Song has Yet to be Sung.
Publication Information:
ISBN: 979-8-9923254-0-9 Author: Billy Don Loper Publication Date: August 16, 2025
Any support, even just giving these posts a read, is always appreciated.
Recent Updates:
No new publication announcements or major updates! Just remember that BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS is coming Summer of THIS YEAR! The Song has yet to be Sung.
Project Progress:
I am working through the rough draft of Song of Calarine Book 2, and am about 100 pages into it, give or take. It’s going to be a long one.
As far as publication status on BRN goes, there is a slight update. After some back and forth with an artist/author friend of mine, I’m going to be getting covers done by them instead of working on them myself! We’re almost done with all of the covers, so we aren’t too far from the cover reveal. Stay tuned for that!
Recent Fascinations: The Vagabond Month
Welcome to 2025.
This year is set to be a pretty wild year for me. As all y’all have to know by now, my debut novel BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS is set to release this Summer. I’m pretty confident at this point that meeting that projected release season won’t be any problem. I’ll be setting a tentative release date in the coming months, around the same time I do the cover reveal, so be watching for that. The release process will keep me pretty busy in the second half of this year, between the events I plan to do in support of it and the push I’ll be making on social media. I’m both excited and terrified, which I think is pretty normal.
Of course, my release of BRN isn’t the only thing that’ll be going on this year, but it’s the primary thing on my mind right now. You’ll find no discussion of politics, one way or the other, here, though I’m sure those sorts of things are dominating people’s minds right now.
In the sci-fi/fantasy/horror space, I’m sure another thing on people’s minds is the recent news story from VULTURE on Neil Gaiman. You can read that article here, but please proceed with caution. The content of it is heavy, exhausting, and terribly upsetting, regardless of whether or not you are/were a fan. I will give no summary. Just know that if you can think of a content warning to apply to a potential news story, it applies to that one. Proceed with caution.
I guess, despite how much I try not to let these sorts of things consume me, the news on Neil Gaiman has been my “recent fascination”. I have talked before about Gaiman’s AMERICAN GODS as my second favorite book of all time for…years. Nearly a decade. I will not parse that out here right now, maybe in February.
Beyond the publication of my own book and the otherwise upsetting SFF/H news, not much has been on my mind. January, for me, is often a kind of transitory period. It is the start of the busy season at my day job, and there’s still a lot of cool down from the holidays going on in my personal life. I often claim February as my period of rest and resetting, that beautiful transitional period from Winter to Spring, which I always enjoy. January, though, is a month of shifting and waning interest. Of rediscovery and personal adjustment.
The Vagabond Month.
One thing that does often lend itself to January is the period of global self reflection in the Western World, with the constant barrage of New Year’s Resolutions. I’m not a resolution person, though I do often take this beginning month to think about the things I’d like to change in the coming year. Most of that is personal, and I won’t share those here. I demand at least some semblance of a private life in this cyberpunk dystopia we live in.
What I will share, though, is my writing plans.
Once I finish up the rough draft of SoC 2, I plan to edit a handful of short stories I have sitting around and submit them for publication. I didn’t publish any new fiction in ‘24, because I was so focused on BRN, but I want to try and get some submissions in before the publishing schedule for my novel gets too strenuous. We’ll see how that goes. Other than that, I think you can expect some sort of new essay here on the effect of social media and what it does to me, my writing, and my experience as a writer in general. Yes, I know I’ve talked about it before. No, I won’t stop.
Otherwise, we’re all headed into a new year, and I think we can only move forward and keep a beautiful line from LONESOME DOVE by Larry McMurtry in mind.
“Yesterday’s gone down the river and you can’t get it back.”
Any support, even just giving these posts a read, is always appreciated.
Recent Updates:
No new publications or major announcements. Just remember that my debut novel, BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS, is set to release Summer ‘25. The Song has yet to be Sung.
Project Progress:
I have completed outlining Book 2 of SONG OF CALARINE, and I am now sitting at about 50 pages into the first draft.
As far as the publication process of BRN, I’m currently working through some cover ideas and getting assets from an artist friend as part of that.
As far as the OTHER projects I’ve talked about, they’re on hold until I finish the first draft of book 2.
Recent Fascinations: My Top Reads of 2024
It’s that time of the year again! Time for me, for no reason beside tracking my own developing reading tastes, to put together my Top Five Reads of 2024. There’s a lot of good ones to talk about this year, but first I just want to lay out a few things.
These aren’t new books. I did read some newer stuff this year, but most of the time I read whatever I want. (I read nothing published in 2024 this year). However, most of the books on this list are older, some are very old, so just remember that this isn’t a top list of 2024 releases, just my favorite reads this year.
Spoilers. I won’t be overtly spoiling the entire plots of anything, but consider everything that follows analysis, and therefore some things will be spoiled. If you’re one of the people that are very spoiler adverse, I appreciate you stopping by, but this probably won’t be for you. You have been warned.
Now then, on to the:
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Picking five was very hard this year, so hard that I almost did ten instead, but I decided at the end that writing in depth pieces on ten books would be too much. Instead, I put together a list of four honorable mentions, with just a brief statement about why I loved them so much.
CLAYMORE, Norihiro Yagi
A fun, action packed, and terrifying grimdark fantasy manga about, at the end fo the day, uplifting women. Overall, it was really fun and I recommend it for any fans of dark manga and grimdark fantasy. By far the best new manga I read this year.
THE SURGEON’S MATE, Patrick O’Brian
What can I say about a Aubrey and Maturin book that I haven’t already said in the past? This one, the seventh in the series, is another of the “shoreside” books, where much of the plot happens on land. Read the series, it’s fantastic and this one was genuinely exciting and surprising.
MEXICAN GOTHIC, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
I read this one as part of a book club I participate in along with some writer friends, and it was so much better than I ever expected. It is dark, gothic, terrifying, and genuinely surprising. I don’t want to spoil the twists, but I will say: if you like horror, read it.
SUTTREE, Cormac McCarthy
Over the past couple years, McCarthy has quickly become one of my favorite writers, and SUTTREE, a semi-autobiographical book about a man who abandons everything to live the life of a river-dwelling vagabond, was another near-perfect outing. It didn’t make it into the main list, but if you like Southern Fiction, give it a read.
Now, on to the big show.
TOP FIVE BOOKS:
NUMBER FIVE: SIX WAKES, MUR LAFFERTY
“Principles are easy to have when you have a place to live and regular meals.”
I have been following Lafferty via her podcast I SHOULD BE WRITING for a long time, but I’m ashamed to say that it took me until this year to finally read one of her books. I’m glad I decided to start with SIX WAKES, because it was exactly my type of thing. Despite being on the shorter end of the SFF I typically read, right at 400 pages, it feels wide-spanning and fully engrossing. It’s hard to explain exactly what type of sci-fi this story is, because it does a lot of things at once. It is an exploration of future politics, it is the exploration of new and changing technology, it is a clone story, and it’s a generation ship story. However, despite doing so many things at once, I found that, for me, it did all of them so well that I got on board from the very beginning. Lafferty managed to lay out a story that explores the reality of consciousness and a story about second chances in a way that intertwined all of the various plot threads into one satisfying and exciting finale. If you like sci-fi, any kind of sci-fi, I can’t recommend this one enough.
NUMBER FOUR: LORD OF CHAOS, ROBERT JORDAN
“Asha’man…kill!”
Of course a WHEEL OF TIME book had to make its way onto this list somewhere. I managed to make it through two of the books this year, LOC and A CROWN OF SWORDS, and Chaos was by far my favorite. It’s actually one of my favorites of the series (so far). It is almost impossible to talk about a single entry of WOT without letting some spoilers slip through, and despite my declaration that spoilers could be in these reviews, that just isn’t something I want to do here. WOT is a once in a lifetime experience, and I really encourage everyone (who REALLY likes slow-burn fantasy) to read the series. For a spoiler free, teaser-esque review, I will say this: there is a very particular moment in LORD OF CHAOS where the series shifts, forever, from a fantasy story about unwanted destiny and saving the world to something much darker. It becomes a commentary on war, and the horror that is sometimes required of soldiers on the frontlines. The Rand Al’Thor that goes into LORD OF CHAOS is not the same man who comes out the other side. That moment is forever seared into my mind. Jordan, for those that don’t know, was a decorated member of the U.S. Army, serving two volunteer duties in Vietnam as a helicopter door gunner. For people not particularly interested in Military History or Vietnam, that might not sound like much, but for people that are they understand exactly why that is such a substantial little piece of Jordan’s biography. Many door gunners lasted weeks, not years. The things that Jordan must have seen, and done, in service to his country clearly affected him, and nowhere is that clearer than in the Battle of Dumai’s Wells. War is hell, fantasy or otherwise. Read it. Read the whole damn series.
NUMBER THREE: I’M GLAD MY MOM DIED, JENNETTE MCCURDY
“I’m trying every day to face myself. The results vary, but the attempts are consistent.”
I grew up during the little period in time when Nickelodeon sitcoms were very popular. My personal favorite of those shows was DRAKE AND JOSH, and that probably shows my age a little comparative to the others. However, the most prolific of those shows was by far ICARLY, which I also ended up watching a fair bit of as a teenager. So, I came into McCurdy’s I’M GLAD MY MOM DIED with a pretty solid baseline understanding of what to expect, but even still that did not prepare me for the harrowing story this book contains. McCurdy’s story is her’s alone to tell, so I won’t go too deep into exactly what this memoir entails, but it was by far the most raw, emotional reading experience I had this year. This one touched me in a lot of really personal ways, and McCurdy’s recounting of the emotional and physical struggles she had throughout her life, things going on in the background of those incredibly popular TV shows, was more impactful than I even know how to explain. I cannot recommend this one enough, but I feel I must attach a caveat: you will never look back on those old Nickelodeon shows in the same way.
NUMBER TWO: DUST, HUGH HOWEY
“Heroes didn’t win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story–the dead didn’t say a word. All of it was bullshit.”
This year, I managed to read through the entirety of THE SILO SAGA by Hugh Howey, and by far my favorite was the finale, DUST. It is personally inspirational for me to see someone come from Self-Publishing to this level of success with a series like this. The Silo books are not cut-down, simple sci-fi meant to play on algorithmic trends or search terms. They are all honest, insightful, and philosophically challenging works that center around the importance of having control over your own fate. For me, the primary draw of the series came from two places: the characters and watching as the various stories began to interweave as the narrative unfurled. That’s why DUST was my favorite, because in the finale the reader gets to see just where that story is headed and how each and every character has their roles to play. If my number five pick, SIX WAKES, takes several stories and intertwines them into a single satisfying narrative, DUST, and again the entire series, does that on a much grander, more incredible scale. The way everything comes together in the finale, connecting characters and plots separated by centuries together, is truly remarkable. I would recommend this one for any and all fans of science fiction, hard or otherwise.
NUMBER ONE: LONESOME DOVE, LARRY MCMURTRY
“Yesterday’s gone down the river and you can’t get it back.”
Often, my number one book is an emotional topic to parse, and this year is no different. No amount of percolating, or extrapolating, can ever allow me to explain what Larry McMurtry’s landmark western LONESOME DOVE means to me. The landmark miniseries, starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, was an important part of my childhood, and I can still remember the first time I sat down to watch it with my dad. It’s a damn fine series, but now, finally having gotten around to reading the book, I can say that it does not compare to McMurtry’s masterpiece. Forget westerns, this is, by far, the second best book I have ever read (only Harper Lee’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD stands above it in my mind). McMurtry carries the reader through a painstaking character study of the two central figures, former Texas Rangers Call and McCrae, and throughout the story the reader is subjected to the sweeping horrors of the American West. It is a painful, emotional, and philosophically exhausting trek from rural Texas to the wild and untamed Montana, and along the way the reader will fall in love with characters in ways they never thought possible. The book is a little over 850 pages in the version I read, and it still felt too short. I plan to reread it next year. I think that’s a fine way to end this list, with a recommendation for a book I doubt will ever be topped.
Any support, even just giving these posts a read, is always appreciated.
Recent Updates:
In case you didn’t see last month’s blog post HERE, I recently announced that my debut novel BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS will be released Summer ‘25. So be sure to keep up to date.
Project Progress:
Publication progress on BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS is paused at ISBN verification. I’ll be picking up that in December. Everything is on track.
I am currently outlining BOOK 2 of The Song of Calarine.
In the meantime, likely until Jan ‘25, the LitFic manuscript project is on hold, as well as the horror novella and SciFi post apocalypse project.
Recent Fascinations: Heading Toward the End of the Year
For those of you unfamiliar with how the end of the year typically goes on my blog, December is reserved every year for my TOP 5 READS. In the past this hasn’t left much room for talking through my year in writing. So, in the effort to have my cake and eat it too, that’s what I’m going to do here. Let’s just talk about what a mess 2024 has been for me and my writing.
If you’ve been following along for a while now, then you know how much things have changed since January of ‘24. I have gone from “in the query trenches” to well on my way towards self-publishing my debut novel next Summer. This has been a long, rocky road marred with varying crises (both writing related and personal). I have lost people, I’ve had mental health struggles, and I’ve, at times, struggled with writing all together, much of which has been documented here to one degree or another. So, where has that left me, as I work on book two and in a holding pattern on book one’s publication? How does that road look when I look back along it?
It looks incredible.
I don’t mean that in retrospect everything was easy and obvious, that certainly isn’t the case, but I think that often when we (meaning just people in general) look back over the year at life’s ups and downs we see it in cold facts of good and bad. But 2024 has not been a year of black and white simplicity. There has been a great deal of progress made in some places, near total stagnation in others. The year that I have had will, beyond anything, have an undeniable impact on my writing going forward, but overall, it is hard to look at the year and think it was entirely good or bad. It simply was.
So, looking back on everything that has gone on (so far) in 2024, I am hard pressed to say it was an outright BAD year. I don’t think I could say that about many years, with the heart of COVID being the sole outlier. I am, generally speaking, a pretty optimistic person, despite any signs to the contrary. That’s partly why I stayed pretty positive on querying until I finally turned away from it. Complaining often does little besides make me feel worse about a situation.
Now, one thing I will remark on is that, just like my comments thus far in this post, very little of 2024 had much to do with…actually writing. I spent a great deal of time on that original querying process, and I certainly have written a handful of things, including about 45% of a new LitFic manuscript that is currently on hold to focus on book two of Calarine. However, I published exactly zero new short stories this year, with all three of my current publications coming in early ‘23. I don’t mean to say that this makes me feel less-than or like a failure, I did a lot to further my writing career this year, but it is important to note, I think. Sometimes being a writer can mean very little progress on the actual writing, it seems.
2024 has been a year of very real progress. BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS was declared truly, 100% done and is on track for publication. I’ve started some other projects, I’ve broadened my reach online, and I’ve begun to establish myself as a local writer. It’s all part of the process.
Any support, even just giving these posts a read, is always appreciated.
A Very Special Announcement: BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS, SUMMER 2025
This entry will be a little different. No big project updates/announcements section because I have a big announcement I want to spend the entirety of my time here on.
As some of you may have seen, I announced my debut novel BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS, currently slated for release in late Summer 2025.
For those of you who’ve been following my publishing journey here, you’ll understand why this is such a huge decision. I’ve spent the better part of a year querying agents in hopes of going the “traditional” publishing route, but after some previously discussed issues in this process (which you can read about here) I’ve decided to go the self-publishing route. For years, this story was the unnamed “sci-fantasy story” I’ve been working on. In reality, it’s a kind of scifi-tinged Dark Fantasy story in the vein of the Dark Tower.
Here’s a quick blurb of the story:
Sarah Silvergrove has spent two years trying to outpace the guilt she carries over the death of a friend. Living as a nomadic traveler and attached to no one, she discovers the Belhaven, a haunting library hidden in the ruins of a long abandoned city. It holds the secrets to commanding the world’s magic, and Sarah, now one of the few magic users not under the control of the struggling empire, sets out to build a new community in hopes of redemption. But when a charismatic traveler arrives and integrates himself into the budding community, Sarah begins to worry that she is destined to fail again. Terrified of the task at hand, but knowing she cannot pass it on, Sarah must decide if she will let her failures define her or if she can defend the library and those who have come to trust in her. Greater mechanisms than her are pulling at the chords of destiny, and her fight for redemption will test everything she thought she knew about herself.
The Song has yet to be Sung.
If that sounds like you’re kind of thing, please follow along and grab the book when it becomes available. I’ll keep you all updated, trust me.
As far as what this announcement means for these newsletters and my blog in general, there’s a few things you should all probably know going forward;
There will be a lot more promotion here going forward.
–This will mean a lot of things, but most of all that the purely opinion/announcement focused nature of this thing will change quite a lot. I may push my socials more, I will absolutely bring up the book every change I get.
There will be no more “Project Progress” announcements.
–Instead, this section will be replaced with “Publication Updates”. This will give me some space to keep you all updated on the publication timelines.
A lot more will be going on strictly on my website (billyloperhistory.com) so if you don’t check there every once in a while, maybe do.
Other than that, I don’t think there’s much more I can say besides: thanks. Thank you all for taking your time to read these, for being part of this journey. We’ll be back to normal business next month.
Any support, even just giving these posts a read, is always appreciated.
Recent Updates:
No major updates. There are some updates to be had on my publishing journey
Project Progress:
Boy howdy is that a complicated question today.
So, as I hinted I might do in the previous post, I have put my literary fiction long-form project on hold in order to make some progress on my big Sci-Fantasy project. That will probably stay that way for a while, if not until the end of the year. That’s all I’ll say here, because this whole thing is the topic of today’s post.
Recent Fascinations: The Great Things Ahead Along the Long Hard Road
In my July/August edition, I mentioned that I had been courting the idea of self-publishing after some pretty insane, though not uncommon, struggles in the query trenches and discovering/being guided to some cost-saving open-source software. Well, I guess this can be considered the official statement that I WILL be self-publishing my long-discussed sci-fantasy project in 2025.
I started this project back in 2021, and now it is pretty much exactly a year from when people besides my close writer friends will get to read it. I’m excited, but more than just a little terrified of this. The idea of my book, one that I’ve put so much of myself into, being in strangers hands feels terrifying.
Those previously mentioned open source programs have made an enormous difference, with GIMP helping me make real progress on getting cover ideas settled, and currently I’m going through and doing all final formatting of my novel with Scribus, which has honestly been a blast. That is probably what’s been most interesting to me as I’ve started down this path: I’m discovering I really love all the different aspects of self-publishing. I’ve even gone through and written up some loglines/pitches in preparation of the announcement/title reveal (which I’m hoping to do in October), and I’ve found that enjoyable too. All of that is basically saying that I am finding self-publishing, in this early, fledgling hour, genuinely fun and exciting.
The irony of this whole thing is not lost on me, believe me. I know that if any one of you were to decide to go back through the backlog of my 2024 blog posts, and maybe even a few of those from ‘23, you’d find some very similar posts where I am talking about how fun and exciting querying is. As I sit here typing all of this out, that hesitation of the veneer of excitement is very, very tangible, I promise you. But, I feel like there’s a pretty big core difference between what made querying feel fun and what is making this self-pub process feel fun.
Control.
While parts of querying were certainly fun, what finally drove me away was the near total lack of control I had over the process. You query, but you get to know nothing about the status, decisions, or general mechanisms that happen behind the scenes. With self-publishing, I have total control over every aspect of this process right up until the point that I finally release the damn thing. Of course, I’m not so delusional to think that I can brute-force myself into a Travis Baldree-style super success with incredible sales that launch an international career. I don’t know how my sales will go once I launch, I don’t know if I’ll ever make a single dollar off of it.
I can tell you, though, that I will know EVERYTHING that is happening, because I’ll be in charge of it, and for someone as neurotic as me, that sounds just fine. So I’m going to tackle this self-published with everything I have, and I’ll be sure to keep y’all updated.
July/August ‘24: On Querying, Hating It, and General Discontent
Thanks for reading!
Any support, even just giving these posts a read, is always appreciated.
Recent Updates:
No major updates. There are some updates to be had on my querying journey, but, as the title suggests, we’ll save that for the main event.
Project Progress:
Still carving away at that first literary fiction long form project I mentioned back in May. I’m making good progress, and the project is enjoyable, which is about all that matters, I guess. I’m also taking a look at some last needed edits on my sci-fantasy story from feedback that I got from my full request rejection. I’ll likely soon put the lit-fic on hold to turn my attention to those edits.
Recent Fascinations: The Query Process, or Why Writers Drink
If my querying journey has done anything for me as a writer, it has shown me how naive I was when I first started this process. Coming into this with a couple solid years experience in the cycle of submitting to Lit-Mags, I thought I had ironclad defenses against the querying trenches, against the exhaustion and constant uncertainty the process is notorious for.
I was, in fact, very wrong.
Querying is a beast unlike any other I have ever seen. If I had to, under duress and poor consideration, compare it to any one experience I’ve had in my life, it would be job hunting, though even that feels incomplete in its description. Querying is opaque, individualistic, and rapidly changing in ways I never expected when I first got started. Nothing about it is explained or readily available, and there is no way to ever, regardless of research, know what lies ahead. None of this, though, is about query REJECTIONS. The rejections haven’t really done anything to bring me down, and while getting a rejection from the single full request I’ve sent out thus far was upsetting, it didn’t really hurt my morale in any tangible way. What did, though, is everything that came after.
The feedback I got from that full was great. It was real, actionable feedback, and I quickly made a plan for moving forward. My intention was to let the queries I had out at the time play out, edit according to the feedback, and then do a new wave of submissions. My primary reason for going about it this way was simple: my number one choice of agent had yet to review my initial query. I did not want to be halfway through with some substantial edits when this agent, who I thought was a great fit, decided on my query on the off chance they requested a full manuscript. I knew there was a chance that she could reject it, but that was fine. I’m fine with rejection. Turns out, rejection isn’t necessarily the worst thing that can happen.
While the agent who requested my full was a big name, and I submitted to them as a kind of “shoot your shot” sort of thing, there was always another agent that was my main choice. I queried this agent early in the process, when I first found out about them. My sci-fantasy story fit their wishlist, they had a transparent process, a strong online presence, and they seemed like a generally nice person. You’ll notice that I’m using a lot of past-tense here, and I want to be clear that this agent still has a strong online presence and still seems, by all measures, to be a thoughtful and kind person. The issue, really, is with me using the term “agent” to describe them.
The issue is that my “dream” agent is no longer an agent at all.
After over 190 days, well over six months, of waiting and hoping for a full request, the agent I had high hopes for left agenting all together. While I don’t mean to say this was a horrible thing or that I’m owed something for my time, I think it’s pretty clear how this could feel devastating in the moment. However, it wasn’t really the act of them leaving that devastated me, nor even losing progress on a query I’d invested so much time in. What haunts me, even now as I write this, is a simple thought: What if all this had happened after this agent had made me an offer?
In other words, what if I had made it past the initial query, beyond the full, and had finally become an agented author, only to have the rug pulled out from under me? I honestly am not sure how I could survive something like that. How I could, having been sent tumbling back down the mountain to restart this great Sisyphian task. I’m not sure I would even be able to find the energy to write, at least not for a long while.
As of now, I am not sure what the road forward is, what I will do, but I know that querying looks, feels, and behaves less attractive every day. I do not blame this agent, I blame the system. The boulder bearing down on the shoulders of so many writers, and the mountain that never ends.
The August Addendum: The Obvious Labors Ahead
Well, I didn’t get this thing finished before the end of July. I don’t really have any excuse for why besides procrastination and general burnout. Not necessarily burnout on this newsletter, but burnout on existence, though I don’t really intend to elaborate any further than that.
There is something, though, that lends itself to a little addendum to the end of this newsletter, making me feel at least a little better about running behind. After the proverbial fallout of the agenting issue, and my just total inability to force myself to go back to that whipping post, I have started thinking about self-publishing again. I think having control, regardless of the enormous amounts of work and personal stress it might create, will be more valuable to me than this purgatory of an unknowing end. I haven’t come to a major conclusion on this, though I think I will have by the middle of August, but I have come across, or rather, been led to, an answer to my major concern about self-publishing.
The big thing standing between me and self-publishing, besides some misplaced notions around legitimacy that even now are hard for me to shake off, has been the overhead cost involved in it. Cover design, book layout, and other various things have always felt very overwhelming. While I have some experience with graphic design training and can, theoretically, manage to fulfill these things myself, the software to do so is often prohibitively expensive. Well, a couple writer friends have recently pointed me towards a handful of open-source software which, by all measures, would make most of the process largely free. I don’t mean to say I’m a secret world-class cover designer, but I do have some long-ago training in graphic design and I am confident that I can manage a quality, minimalist-style cover, and if that is what stands between publishing and not-publishing, then I don’t see why that shouldn’t be something that I at least consider.
These pieces of software, which at the time of writing I’m actively looking at and messing around with, are certainly pushing me towards self-publishing. The idea of being an eccentric local author, even an unsuccessful one, feels more and more attractive in comparison with being Sisyphus, perpetually rolling his boulder up the mountain.
Any support, even just giving these posts a read, is always appreciated.
This Month Will be a Little Different:
June is a busy month in my life for a lot of reasons, and this June has already been one of particular intensity both physically and mentally. So, you’ll excuse me if I cheat. Instead of my typical newsletter, I’m sharing a (very) short piece of creative nonfiction that I wrote for an author event I did a while back in Brandon, Mississippi.
Among the many things that makes June a consistently stressful month for me and my family, Father’s Day rests neatly in the middle. The task of scheduling family get-togethers in an already busy month on top of trying to take some time for ourselves as a family is only been compounded by the loss of my grandfather last May. So, in an effort to remove some of the general tensions right now, and provide a little memorialization for my grandfather, this month’s newsletter is just a piece of short CNF, dedicated to him.
It’s short, but I like it. I hope you will too.
“GRAVESIDE”-BY: Billy Don Loper
The light filtered down through Granny’s pine trees the way it always had. Little glimmers of radiance caught in a breathless moment before being cast to the ground in their moving shimmer. The trees had been little once, toddling things dug up from somewhere near the fence row on the other side of the graveyard. She had always intended to move there, that little patch of hilly old farm field on her father’s land, closer to her children and grandchildren. But, the grandchildren moved away, and before long, it was too late, and she was too old and eaten up with cancer to move anywhere.
Still, she did make it there, in the end. Her own stone placed just beyond the fence of the family graveyard, there in the place where the pines cast their light. She had always liked the shade of her trees, so it seemed right and proper that she should spend her time in the ground beneath them. That had been The Eldest’s decision, as most of them had been. When the long wait passed and the heavy stone finally placed, a double one waiting on its other occupant, a little bench was put there too. Green or black, the color never really stood out against the rusting wrought iron and flaking paint, but it was sturdy and high enough that The Husband didn’t need any help getting up.
That’s where I’d found him, me being the Eldest of the Eldest and sent to hunt him down an hour late for the family Easter. He was sitting on the bench, a metal cane leaning on one knee, and as soon as I shut my truck door I could hear him talking to her. He sat on the side of the bench aligned with his own stone, leaving space enough for her. I think I could see that when I walked the short way from the end of the drive to her trees, and that’s why I never did sit down. I hated making him look up to me, but it didn’t feel right to sit there in a spot he had saved for someone else.
“Hey, there you are. Dad sent me looking for you.”
“Mm? Why’s that?”
“Easter. You’re done supposed to be over at the house.”
That thin, gaunt face that I never did reconcile as his pulled tight when he nodded, his focus back to her and her trees. He did, though, spare a moment to glance at his watch. “Didn’t realize it’d gotten so late.”
“That’s all right. We just didn’t want you to have gotten off or hurt.”
“No, I’m all right. Just sitting here. I like to come sit every once in a while.”
“Okay, well. You sure you’re okay?”
“Oh yeah, just want to sit here a bit longer. I’ll come on in a little while.”
There was a silence there, however brief, that lingered between me and him. His frame, thinned and worn down by his heart disease and her cancer, didn’t look like the man I had grown up knowing. It never did, no matter how long I lived with it or how long it was the truth. I thought about all the trouble we’d had with him in those weeks leading up. His mind slipping, the doctor’s screaming Alzheimer’s despite its sudden appearance, though that never quite settled with me. It always felt like the long weariness of a house once shared, now filled with ghosts and memories.
“All right, well. I’m gonna head back and let Pop know you’re here and okay. You going to come on that way in a little bit, right?”
“Yeah, just a little bit.”
“Okay, see you when you get there.”
My boot heels scraping on that half-damp grass hid most of it, but even before I stopped to open the door of my pickup I could hear him. With her again.
Part of him, anyway.
For Donald Ray Loper-Father, Grandfather, and Great Grandfather.
Any support, even just giving these posts a read, is always appreciated.
Recent Updates:
It’s with a degree of severe melancholy that I let y’all know that the full request I had out has been rejected. However, searching for that every hazy silver lining, the agent did provide me with some great, actionable feedback.
The trenches remain.
Project Progress:
Finished a round of edits on the horror novella, so I’m taking a break to draft a new project. It’s my first attempt at literary fiction in long form, and will likely be a long process.
Recent Fascinations: Outlining, Writing from the Gut, and the Eternal Battle Within
If you sit down and talk with any group of writers, they’ll be a couple of topics that always come up. Adverbs, passive voice, and editing are some of the more common ones, but by far the most repeated topic of conversation for writers is the eternal debate between Outliners and Non-Outliners.
The conversation comes in a dozen different forms. Perhaps the two best known are George R. R. Martin’s distinction between “Gardeners and Architects” and the National Novel Writing Community’s “Pantsers and Planners.” While at one time GRRM’s essay on the topic might’ve been the better known of the two, NaNoWriMo’s pervasive presence online has caused Pantser/Planner to become the default framework. I won’t be using either set of these labels.
To categorize these two processes in terms like this applies some sort of value judgment towards one or the other. You’re either a gardener, who lets their novel flow from his fingertips with the speed at which it requires and in the way the whims of the words see fit, or you’re an architect, who meticulously shapes the words and then constructs his novel according to the plans devised. You’re either a pantser, flying by the seat of your pants, or a planner, organized and disciplined. I do not mean that I think GRRM or the NaNoWriMo folks are meaning to say that one or the other is better, but I do think that categorizing yourself or your writing style says something about the processes inherent in both.
I have the (not so unique) position of having been both an outliner and a non-outliner. Early on in my fledgling days, I read Stephen King’s ON WRITING for the first time, where he talks at great lengths about why doesn’t outline, and about how he sees writing as a near-spiritual experience. At the time, I latched onto this idea and steadfastly refused to ever use an outline in my writing. This process created a lot of false starts, half finished projects, and a handful of pretty good short stories, but it never quite felt like how I was supposed to be writing. To be sure I am clear: I am not saying that I had some grand revelation that King was wrong. Obviously it works for him. Instead, what I’m getting at is that I tried to lump myself in with the writers that so adamantly denies outlining that it becomes personality. The gardeners. The pantsers. I tried to align myself with that style of writing, when it just never worked for me.
As I started (attempting) to take writing more seriously, dedicating myself to finishing projects and focusing on getting published, I started to reevaluate my writing process. As I finished up the first draft of my Sci-Fantasy WIP (the one that’s currently being queried), I realized that so much of the text was aimless, and that because of that my prose had lost its focus and been blunted. So, as I moved forward with new projects and planning the sequel to my Sci-Fantasy project, I started to lean more and more on outlining. I’ve found that in the initial rough draft I am more able to focus on language, crafting clear metaphors, and precise characterization, because I am not so focused on where the story is going.
More profound than the direct affect on my writing process, though, has been the way outlining didn’t affect how I feel when I write. I have said here before that I have a near-compulsive need to write. Writing is always on my mind, and much in the way King describes it in ON WRITING, it sometimes feels like a near-spiritual experience for me. But, unlike what King posits, turning towards a more structured, outlined approach to writing has not lessened that at all. I still feel like I’m writing from my gut, from the center of my being, regardless of how much thought I’ve put into it beforehand.
Outlining and not-outlining aren’t some diametrically opposed mechanisms that decide the way writing works or is conceptualized for a given writer. They’re just tools and methods for all of us, things to help us get our stories out there. A chisel in the hand of the carpenter.
As long as we get our stories out, it doesn’t really matter how we hold the chisel.
Any support, even just giving these posts a read, is always appreciated.
Recent Updates:
Still waiting to hear back from the single full request I have out at the moment.
Other than that, I’ve had a few other rejections, sent a few others out. The trenches remain.
I was a featured author at the Brandon Public Library for Central Mississippi Regional Library System’s Author Brunch. I put together a sort-of unofficial and thrown together mini-collection for it and have a few copies left. If you’re interested in buying one, for 10 bucks, email me at loperwrites@gmail.com.
Project Progress:
Still in the process of editing the horror novella, and I expect progress there to be pretty slow going. It’s an old story that needs a lot of reexamination.
Recent Fascinations: An Essay on Character Incited by Larry McMurtry
The idea for this essay has been on my mind since I finished my first read through of Larry McMurtry’s titanic classic LONESOME DOVE, but this or that got in my way every time I went to write it. Either a deep bout of melancholia or a full request or something of that ilk, and this is a thought that, to the best of my ability, I want to give room to breathe.
For a great part of my time (so far) as a writer, I considered myself a character writer. I’ve talked about this before here, about the way that my own perception of my writing has shifted from character centric to setting centric. I still believe that, but that doesn’t mean I don’t crave good characters in the stories I read.
All of my favorite books, and I mean all of them, are character driven, regardless of whether or not that type of storytelling is the center of the stories I write. I’ve been trying for years to find a way to put into words exactly why I feel this way. Why reading THE STAND makes me feel the way it does. Why AMERICAN GODS brought me to bitter, sobbing tears. And finally, a little over halfway through LONESOME DOVE, I found them, and, in the words of Kerouac, they were simple.
Po Campo is God.
Okay, maybe I should elaborate. I don’t actually think McMurtry ever meant for the Hat Creek Company’s second camp cook to represent God. The character isn’t a vessel for magic realism or anything like that, and he doesn’t represent some perfect, Christ-like figure. But he is important.
LONESOME DOVE is full of characters, but for the short walk through its archetypes that I need to go on in order to set up the bulk of this essay, I’m going to focus on three.
The Stoic: Woodrow Call
The Epicurean: Augustus McCrae
The Satisfied Man: Po Campo.
While Woodrow and Gus are, from the very beginning, meant to represent opposite sides of the same coin, Po Campo’s arrival signals something else. He is a man, despite the hardships both ahead and behind, who is satisfied. He is happy with his life as it is and expects very little from himself and those around him, while also taking an enormous amount of pride in his craft. Woodrow seeks meaning and direction from labor, Gus seeks the same from joy and vice, but Po Campo seeks nothing and makes due with what is passed to him from beyond.
Now, that in mind, I’m going to abruptly pivot away from LONESOME DOVE the story and towards character in general. The ideas behind these three core concepts are not particular deep or revolutionary, even at the time of publication.
Call works hard and is seldom satisfied.
Gus doesn’t work and is seldom satisfied.
Po Campo is satisfied.
Where the importance of these characters comes from, what gives them their layers, is the experiences they have on the page.
While there is a sea of experiences behind the pages for all of the characters of LONESOME DOVE, and most other epic-length modern novels, it isn’t those experiences that carry the reader along. It is the things the characters do from the time the reader picks up with them. This carries true even for series that start the reader and the characters both at the “true” beginning. In Robert Jordan’s epic masterpiece THE WHEEL OF TIME, the reader starts the story with the main characters from their first call to action and then Jordan carries us along on the entire (and I mean ENTIRE) journey. It is through those shared experiences that WOT or LONESOME DOVE or any other character driven story earns its keep.
So, that brings me back to Po Campo, and why he’s our ineffable savior.
Despite the comedy and beauty and introspection, much of LONESOME DOVE is a harrowing experience. There is great violence and brutality on the pages of that novel, and at times, especially once Blue Duck makes his appearance, that brutality can feel oppressive. So oppressive that at one point, a literal, biblical-scale plague of grasshoppers descends on the Hat Creek Outfit. However, through it all, Po Campo does not falter. He is steadfast in his every action, past and present, and never doubts himself or his dedication to the road ahead. Perhaps most memorable is when he states that his wife is “in hell where I sent her,” without so much as a smidge of regret or introspection.
LONESOME DOVE is a book about characters, and almost the entirety of its purpose is the development of those characters, but, as I’ve said, Po Campo remains. There is no growth for him provided in the story, no examples of the ways the road north changed him. He is known, certain, stalwart. Po Campo, in other words, is God.
Writing characters that live and breathe through the page is hard, exhausting labor for me. It’s something I have to work at, something that never comes natural in the flow of my prose. I think that difficulty is what drew me to Po Campo as I read McMurtry’s masterpiece. I struggle to imagine the ideas that must have passed through McMurtry’s mind as he drafted the earliest versions of LONESOME DOVE. I wonder about the changes that Po Campo had to go through in order to live on the page as totally and believably as he does from his very first appearance.
I don’t think I’ll ever achieve that, that I’ll ever write my own Po Campo.
But, then again, what’s the point in riding for Montana if you’re already there.
