Category: 2025 Monthly Updates

Thanks for Reading!

Any support, even just giving these posts a read, is always appreciated.

Still want to grab my book BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS?

Get the Ebook here: Campfire 

Get Paperback and Hardback here: Bookshop.org 

Recent Updates: 

Still planning out my Summer Events. 

To stay up to date, follow me on Facebook.

Project Progress: 

My Horror Novella Project is back from the editor! I’ll be working on completing the edits and getting it to my final reader after I finish the rough draft of the short story I’m currently working on.  

A cast iron dutch oven cooking over a camp fire. Photo by the author. 

Recent Fascinations | The Fiction Books that Made Me #2: LONESOME DOVE by Larry McMurtry

“It’s like I told you last night son. The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight, he added” 

We have now come to the first of two books which I’m afraid I will struggle to fully communicate their importance. The only place I know to start is in explaining how this book came to be on my list at all. There’s a lot to that, so bear with me. 

It is a rare story that impacts us on a personal level, and an even rarer one that fundamentally changes our lives. I think that sort of thing is more common when we are young, high school and those early college years when we are looking for a worldview. It is rarer that one becomes so fundamental to our personal moral ethic late in adulthood. But, this book did that for me.

This is the book on this whole list that I have read most recently, having read it for the first time only two years ago. I had seen the TV miniseries a dozen times over the years, but never gotten around to reading the book. I think, though, I couldn’t have read it at a better time in my life. Had I made this list three or four years ago, there would have been a different book here, one that had lived in this #2 spot for years and years and had been enormously important to me as a writer and as a person. 

Neil Gaiman’s AMERICAN GODS. 

A few years ago, though, Gaiman (who I would have listed as one of my most beloved writers) was revealed as a decidedly shit person. A (alleged) rapist, a monster. Choose whatever word you most want to associate with him. I’m not saying that this list of writers is free of shit people, Hemingway and Faulkner are two of the most controversial men to ever exist in the space, but my relationship with Gaiman was more complicated than the appreciation I have for Hemingway and Faulkner.. That is not something I intend to unpack here, but it is something I plan to go into in a future newsletter edition. 

Regardless of whatever personal hypocrisies might have influenced it, I found myself not able to even look at Gaiman’s books on my shelf after a while. It was at that time, too, that I began to struggle more and more with my mental health, falling into periods of extended depression. And it was then, in that quiet internal storm, that I first read McMurtry’s LONESOME DOVE. 

It is hard to explain what exactly makes this story so special to me. Like most fiction, a reader’s reaction to LONESOME DOVE will depend on their own personal opinions, where they are in their life, and what they want out of a novel. For my own personal perception of it, there is a great deal that the novel does that seems on one level or another to speak to me directly.  There is the theme of friendship between Call and Gus, a friendship that mimics my own with a close friend and friendly rival. There is also the theme of the two central characters feeling partly responsible for the destruction of a world they loved in pursuit of “civilization.” 

“Every bank in Texas ought to pay us a commission for the work we done. If we hadn’t done it, all the bankers would still be back in Georgia, living on poke salad and turnip greens.” 

This quote best exemplifies this theme, and it is something that I find myself looking back on a lot. Gus and Call and many other characters in the book almost seem to long for a wilder period of the West they claim existed. This former period was more violent, more dangerous, more perilous, but to hear the characters in McMurtry’s novel tell it, it was better, too. More pure.  This idea, the idea of a golden past that slipped by without us realizing it, appeals to me a great deal. It is something I can see myself in, that I have felt myself more than once, and especially in those moments where the world has felt its darkest. 

There is, though, another side to this. There is a palpable irony to this romanticized past. A past where Gus lost friends, where he killed countless men. In the end, to spoil the book, it is this romanticization that gets Gus and many of his new friends killed as well. Had they remained complacent, not gone out searching for that old sense of adventure again, then he would have very likely died of old age. But I can’t help but think that Gus would never have been happy with that death. That it was never the longevity of life that mattered to him, but instead the experience of it. “It doesn’t matter where you die,” he says at one point, “but where you live.”

I think at this point it should be obvious that Gus is my favorite character. If I am being honest, it is not even close. Gus’s relationship with the world, a relationship that McMurtry characterizes openly as “Epicurean,” is something that I find a lot of value in. When I first read this book, I was at a low. Gus’s rejection of pretension and open embrace of all things wonderful in life was, and is, deeply appealing. During the periods of my life where I feel like everything is bearing down on me, I often find myself thinking back to my favorite Gus quote. 

“It’s a fine world, though rich in hardships at times.” 

My God, ain’t that the truth. 

It isn’t just Gus and McMurtry’s characters that spoke to me, though. So far, I have talked only about my personal relationship with LONESOME DOVE, but this is a newsletter about writing (supposedly), so I should probably talk some on how the book has impacted me as a writer. 

LONESOME DOVE is one of those stories you’ll often hear writers talk about, one that made them question if there was even any point in trying to write at all, considering they could never manage to write anything half as good as what McMurtry managed. This is, of course, ridiculous. LONESOME DOVE isn’t just a Pulitzer winner, it is one of the most beloved works of American fiction ever written, with perhaps the widest appeal of any other Pulitzer winner. I don’t know if I can name any other that went on to become as important to Stephen King as it did truck drivers from south Mississippi and ranch hands in north western Montana. 

Even still, though I know that it’s foolish to compare myself to one of the greatest books ever written, how could I not? When a book has such a profound impact on us as writers, it is hard to not hold our own works up against it and wonder if they’ll ever do the same. Again, I know it’s foolish, but at the same time this line of thinking is often unavoidable. Instead of running from it, I’ve tried to find some wisdom within LONESOME DOVE for my own writing, and what I’ve found might be some of the most important writing advice that I’ve come across. 

First, McMurtry’s masterpiece has taught me that books written almost entirely about a character’s emotions and perceptions can absolutely work. LONESOME DOVE is a work deeply concerned with the feelings and internal lives of its characters. Call’s brooding at the river. Gus’s pursuit of joy. Jake’s fear of what he’s let himself get into. It is a book that lives and dies by the internal world of its characters. My own work, especially THE SONG OF CALARINE, treads similar ground. Sarah’s internal world, her anxieties and failures, are the primary thing I am trying to explore in these stories. I am, of course, not saying that I approach even a smidge of what McMurtry did, but only that LONESOME DOVE has served as a guiding light on how to write this kind of story and write it well. 

The second, though, is perhaps the most important. 

They ain’t all winners. 

McMurtry certainly has other books that are brilliant, but of the ones I’ve read, PRETTY BOY FLOYD and the LONESOME DOVE sequel STREETS OF LAREDO, they’ve ranged from passable to actively upsetting. 

I don’t say all of this to make light of McMurtry’s achievements, he was a master of his craft and there is a legitimate argument to be made that LONESOME DOVE is the greatest work of American literature ever written. Instead, I’m trying to say that I find the same comfort in McMurtry that I do in Stephen King. That yes, they have both written masterpieces that at times make me question why I even try, but they’ve also both written some real duds. 

At the end of the day, I think the most important thing to take away from LONESOME DOVE comes near its early moments. 

“If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk…” 

Thanks for Reading.

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 recently updated my website to highlight my short fiction, and have begun releasing previously unreleased stories there! Head on over! 

Project Progress:

I am so excited to announce that I’ve FINISHED the rough draft of book 2! 

I’m setting it aside to let it “cure” for a while. In the meantime, I’m working on releasing some short stories and editing my Horror novel to get it ready for beta readers. 

Photo of the Mississippi Delta Hardwood Forests, as seen from a tree stand, distorted by the low light conditions of the early morning. 

Photo by author. 

Recent Fascinations | The Fiction Books that Made Me #8: IT

Want to understand what this series is? Go Here 

“What can be done when you’re eleven can often never be done again.”

It would appear I’m back on my Stephen King shit again already. I do not apologize. This particular King novel is one of his most well known and, depending on who you ask, most infamous.

There is an interesting phenomenon with King novels that, before I get into exactly how this novel impacted my own life, I want to talk through. As of writing, King has published north of 70 books. Most of them a lay person has never heard of and, most likely, never will. A great number of his stories have been adapted into movies and TV shows, but even then people either don’t realize the adaptations originated as King stories. Often when one of his stories bucks this trend, it is one of his more palatable novels. THE SHINING is probably the best example, though the movie doesn’t really adapt the story at all. CARRIE would be another, with that particular story having many, many different adaptations. 

Occasionally, though, one of his…weirder stories breaks containment and becomes part of the popular consciousness. CHRISTINE had no reason to get as good of a movie as it did. THE STAND has been adapted, poorly, twice. More recently, GERALD’S GAME was adapted, something I never imagined would happen. It’s a weird story, with some weird elements. But by far the story of his that has so thoroughly defied what should make sense for adaptation is 1986’s doorstopper of a dark fantasy/horror/scifi epic IT. 

Now, it’s time for me to pull the wool from your eyes. This whole little introduction has actually been to serve a very…selfish purpose. It has given me the best opportunity to say something that will ruffle some feathers without putting it front and center: I hate every adaptation of IT and will not be discussing either version further. Pick a clown, Tim Curry or Bill Skarsgaard, I don’t like either one. We will not be discussing either adaptation again in this little essay. 

For me, IT is a novel that defies expectations. People often go into it expecting a straightforward horror novel centered around a killer clown. Certainly, Pennywise is the central antagonist and often takes the form of a flesh-eating clown. To me, though, reducing the book to just this base assertation misses, if you’ll excuse the language, the entire fucking point. 

What the text of IT is really trying to do is pretty straightforward. It is a boomer author dismantling his own nostalgic memories of childhood by pulling away the veneer of civility and positivity so often associated with the 1950s. His method just happens to be an extra-dimensional, malevolent entity that feeds on the raw emotional energy produced by fear, and said entity just happens to occasionally take the form of a clown. Pennywise does this, of course, because people are just scared of clowns. Throughout the novel she (yes, Pennywise is a she) also takes the form of a giant Paul Bunyan statue, a werewolf, an extradimensional spider monster, and several other upsetting pastiches of nightmare imagery. 

While Pennywise is an excellent villain, it isn’t really her that I care about. At least, not as far as IT relates to me and my writing. I can vividly remember the first time I finished reading the novel. It was probably a decade ago. My now wife and I were staying with my parents at Lake Washington in the Delta, and I sped through that beast of a novel over the course of a long weekend. I remember the feeling it left me with wasn’t one of dread, but instead a feeling of abstract introspection. The way King deconstructed his childhood and took a look at the things we most often feel nostalgia for, childhood friendship, our hometowns, deeply affected me. 

None of my writing, thus far, has been focused on deconstructing the nostalgia of my own childhood, but all of it, in one way or another, has attempted to deconstruct what I perceive as the reality of my home state. IT didn’t just show me that doing so was possible, it showed me that the key to doing it well was keeping your characters as human as possible. They need to live and breathe, even if they are irredeemable monsters or foolish kids. 

As my writing has progressed, my style has diverged further and further from that of King. While he still remains a huge inspiration, I don’t spend most of my time attempting to mimic his storytelling style. However, in those earliest foundational moments, his entire catalog contributed to different pieces of my writing. IT taught me, perhaps more than any other novel before or since, that in order to tell a good story, we have to turn our attentions inward. 

And, sometimes, a scary clown is more than just a scary clown. 

Thanks for reading. 

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:

I’ve made a little more progress on book 2! I’m at around 80%.

Photo of the Mississippi Delta hardwood forests in Yazoo County, as seen from a box stand. Photo by the author. 

Recent Fascinations | The Fiction Books that Made Me #9: THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS

Want to understand what this series is? Go Here 

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

I’ve never found it quite so difficult to find a starting place when discussing a book as I have with Ursula K. LeGuinn’s THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS. I think on some level, that is appropriate for such a layered, heartfelt book. To find it hard to put into words must mean, at least I hope it does, that I have internalized and am still processing this book, even though I last read it a little under a decade ago. 

THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS is one of the landmark science fiction stories that veers more toward the soft, thoughtful, introspective side of the genre instead of the “Hard Scifi” territory of those like Heinlein. The story follows an anthropologist from a far-future human society that goes to a distant planet where the biological sex of the native inhabitants is, literally, fluid. This book, which came out in 1969, does not approach this fluidity from any lens that could be perceived as modern or “post-modern” within our current framework. Instead, it uses it to deconstruct the literal, anthropological structure of patriarchy and explore the ways a society might be different if it did not exist in that particular cultural system. Somehow, it does all of this while remaining, at least from the external perspective, non judgemental about either system. 

In other words, to speak academically and be a little pretentious-minded, it is a book that entirely rejects the concepts of ethnocentrism. 

When I first listened to LEFT HAND OF DARKESS, it was 2016 and I was in a difficult period of my life where I was attempting to explore and redefine what I wanted to study in college, having dropped out of my mass communications program just a few months earlier. This story, its exploration of culture and identity from a unique outsider (at least to a rural redneck from South Mississippi), put into motion my eventual decision to study History and Anthropology. 

This is a book, I think, that readers will react differently to depending on the place they approach it from. For me, as I’ve aged and become more educated and, I hope, a little wiser, it is a story that shows that the structures do not really matter, but instead it is the people that must lie at the center of our perceptions.. 

At the end of the day, regardless of background or beliefs, we are all just trying to get by. We’re trying to fall in love, to stay alive, to protect what we see is most important to us. THE LEFT HAND OF DARKESS sings to me most clearly when I feel the most cynical about the world around me. It says that evil is not grand and conspiring, but banal to the point of disappointment. It says that the world, no matter how dire, is made up of people just trying to get by, and the most important thing we can do is to be kind to one another when it matters. 

What could be more beautiful than that?

Thanks for Reading.

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:

September has been very busy because of my day job, so I’m sorry to say that I haven’t made any progress on book 2. It’s still sitting at around 65%. 

Recent Fascinations: The Fiction Stories that Made Me | Introduction and Honorable Mentions

Now that I’m finally on the other side of my debut novel coming out, I feel like I can direct some attention to a different topic that has been on my mind for a while, the stories that have really shaped my writing and my perception of the world. 

I had the idea for this project a while back, I think as far back as May, but knew that I didn’t have the time or the energy to devote to it. I’ve talked before about my favorite books of all time in some light detail, but I’ve never really sat down to examine what my most cherished stories mean to me, how they shaped my personality and my writing, or how my perception on them has changed over time. 

So, now that I’m on the other side of my book’s launch, I want to officially set out and tackle this series of posts. It will be month by month between now and next August, totalling out 12 posts. 

This post will discuss my honorable mentions. 

Then each month for 10 months I will examine my 10 most cherished fiction novels, what they mean to me, and how they’ve influenced me. 

Then, in a final post, I will discuss my “dishonorable” mentions, examining a few picks that I can’t deny influenced me, but, because of one reason or another, I really wish they hadn’t. 

So, that’s enough introduction. Let’s get on with it, huh?

Honorable Mentions

As I started putting together my top 10 list, I realized there were a lot of major influences on my life I couldn’t, for one reason or another, include in that main list. So, instead of tackling them month by month, I’m going to lay out all of the “almosts” here, how they’ve influenced me, and why they didn’t make the cut.

These are in no particular order. 

1. THE LAST APPRENTICE Series, by Joseph Delaney

How It Influenced Me: This series was probably the only YA series I really got into in high school. As a school-aged reader, I, admittedly insufferably, spent most of my time reading classics, literary fiction, and Stephen King. I have no real memories of landmark YA series making any significant impact on me, except this one. I never finished it, the series wasn’t finished and my high school library was very slow about acquiring books, but I loved what I did read, and Delaney’s interweaving and reexamination of traditional English folklore heavily influenced what I do with Southern Folklore in my own work. 

Why I Didn’t Include It: I didn’t finish it then, and I have never gone back to it. Though, since Delaney passed a few years ago, maybe it’s time I finally revisit this and see if it holds up to my modern tastes.

2. The Fiction of Louis Lamour

How It Influenced Me: Boy howdy, where do I start with this one. It’s bold, I guess, to claim an entire bibliography as an influence. I started to choose a series, like THE SACKETTS, or a single work like HONDO, but in the end I think it is just Lamour as a writer that rests most firmly in my mind as an influence. My father, who for most of my life as a kid and a young man was a trucker, was a collector and reader of Louis Lamour. I grew up on his stories, on the adaptations of his stories, on the importance of those pulp western masterpieces. His depiction of nature, of the dichotomy of good and evil have had huge influences on me, but most of all it was the experience of growing up watching my dad read those little novels that led me to my life as a reader. 

Why I Didn’t Include It: I think this one speaks for itself from what I’ve already said. I couldn’t decide on a single work that truly influenced me, and instead it is that I grew up around those old books. I still have most of them, given to me by my dad after he decided he was done with them. In one way or another, Lamour will always be with me. 

3. The Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft

How It Influenced Me: Once again, I have included an entire bibliography here. This one, I will admit, almost ended up in the “dishonorable mentions”, and maybe it should have, but at the end of the day I couldn’t bring myself to put it there. Yes, Lovecraft was a reprehensible monster of a man, a deeply complicated man who seemed to struggle with mental health and his own sexuality, but regardless of any of that was profoundly racist, even by the measure of his day. However, much like Stephen King has often said, I cannot deny the influence that Lovecraft’s writings have had on me. I was very young, around 13, when I read Rats in the Walls for the first time, and it changed how I conceptualized horror and character writing even before I understood that I was conceptualizing those things. The entirety of my writing life has stood in the shadow of Lovecraft, so, despite his horrible flaws, I will give him this single moment of merit. 

Why I Didn’t Include It: This time it wasn’t quite the same as Lamour. I could have easily included “Rats in the Walls” or “At the Mountains of Madness” in the works that most influenced me, but I chose not to. While Lovecraft has undeniably influenced the color and timbre of my writing, I also often try to distance myself from his style intellectually because of just how horrible of a person he was.

4. THE WHEEL OF TIME, by Robert Jordan

How it Influenced Me: I think, if I were to be fair to myself and why this series is here, it should say “How it IS INFLUENCING Me”, because I am currently still in the process of reading this series. Even though, as soon as I started reading it, I knew it would change how I look at fantasy as a genre and what is possible with long-term storytelling. Though I started BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS before I ever started reading Jordan’s series, his work has already begun to influence my writing, and I am confident it will continue to do so. 

Why I Didn’t Include It: Because I haven’t finished it! While its influence on me is already apparent, at least to me, I am not yet ready to claim Jordan as a major influence. Who knows, if I redo this list in ten years time, it could be that Jordan makes his way to the main list. 

5. THE OUTSIDERS, by S.E. Hinton

How It Influenced Me: This one is interesting for a number of reasons. Most notably, it’s because I can’t REALLY say that Hinton’s book influenced me in any particular way. While it was one that I, and many other American children, read in highschool, and I did love it, I don’t see any real way that it found its way into my personal writing style. Instead, this book represents a larger figure in my literary life. My 11th grade English teacher, Mrs. Aultman used THE OUTSIDERS for a very particular lesson in her class: a discussion of banned books. It was in that class that I came to understand what censorship was, why it happens, and what I could do about it. For that, I’ll forever be grateful, and it is a lesson that is forever attached to Hinton’s novel in my mind. 

Why Didn’t I Include It: I think the reason here is obvious! Because the book itself wasn’t necessarily a major influence on me, but instead it more represents a moment of my life where I started to think about books in terms of power and structure of meaning, to get a little academic. 

6. THE REGULATORS, by Richard Bachman (Stephen King)

How It Influenced Me: Come, see this very well. A child, for one as he is can only be called a child, finds on the shelves of his library a book, and within that book was a world unknown, a path taken. Come, for there are other worlds than this, but this one is ours. Anyway, THE REGULATORS, the belated Bachman book that serves as the Twinner story to DESPERATION, was the first Stephen King novel I ever read. 11 years old, I found the thing on the shelves of the school library, and nothing was ever the same. I don’t think I need to say more than that.

Why I Didn’t Include It: While it was my first, it wasn’t my best, if you catch my drift. I still love this book, but there are other, more important King books in my personal cosmos. Don’t worry, we’ll talk a lot about Sai King in the months to come. 

Those are them, and these are all there are. Can’t wait to get started on the meat of my biggest influences. 

Thanks for Reading. 

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.

Thanks for reading! 

Any support, even just giving these posts a read, is always appreciated.

Recent Updates:

My short story “Voluntarily Mandated Training Seminar” was released for free last month. You can read it here.

BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS is now available for preorder. You can see the announcement here.

It’s available everywhere you buy your books. 

Want my recommendation on where to preorder?

Get the Ebook here: Campfire

Get Paperback and Hardback here: Bookshop.org

Project Progress:

Obviously, publication for BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS is on track for AUGUST 16th. Full event announcements are coming next month, stay tuned. 

I’m working through book 2, and I’m about halfway through. 

Other projects are still on hold. 

Recent Fascinations: The Growing Terror of the Light, or Why I’m Starting to Stress about August

Well, after last month’s rather somber tone change, I can at least say that this month’s entry will be back to talking about writing. 

So, my book comes out in right around three months. It’s available for preorder, though I have yet to have anyone preorder it. That doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise, but it is a little disappointing. That, I think, sums up exactly where I am mentally about the upcoming release of my book. 

Existentially terrified. 

In recent weeks, as I’ve basically done everything that I can to prepare for my book coming out, I’ve found myself abjectly terrified of what will ACTUALLY HAPPEN when the damn thing comes out in August. Will my hopes come true and I’ll attain at least some degree of local celebrity for the release of my book? Will I sell out of books and have to cancel events because I can’t order enough fast enough? Or will the absolute worst case scenario happen, and across two months of events I don’t manage to sell more than a handful of books, with any reviews being bad ones?

I don’t know, I can’t know, and that’s driving me insane. 

I don’t mean to sound like I’m doomsaying and having some major crisis of confidence. Instead, it’s more that, as time comes ever closer and the undeniable fact becomes that people will be reading my book, I don’t know how to handle that. 

This feeling, this perpetual sense of growing terror of the light that is soon to be shone on my writing, is something that I don’t think I know how to handle. BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS isn’t perfect, I know that and have known it this entire time, but it is deeply personal. It is an examination of my own mental health struggles, an exploration of pieces of my past, an exploration of the divided ideologies I sometimes find myself existing within. It is also a look at my home, how I see it, and what it means to me. So, then, what if it’s hated? How can I be expected to handle that with any semblance of grace? 

I don’t have an answer to that question, which to be fair is a kind of ridiculous hypothetical to even try and answer, but I do think it highlights where I am about the whole experience of publishing. I’m excited, I can’t wait for the book to come out, and I desperately want it to do well. But, the idea of people reading it makes me want to crawl in a hole and disappear. 

The Growing Terror of the Light. 

Thanks for reading. 

Thanks for reading! 

Any support, even just giving these posts a read, is always appreciated.

Recent Updates:

For once, there’s a LOT of updates to be had. 

First, BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS is on Goodreads and Storygraph now. 

Goodreads

Storygraph

Also, if you’ve been following along on Facebook or Bluesky, you’ll have seen me making several recent announcements for events. 

Here’s a calendar for everything planned for August and September so far:

Remember, BRN hits AUGUST 16TH. 

The Song has yet to be Sung. 

Project Progress:

I’m making steady progress on Song of Calarine Book 2, but don’t have any major updates to share so far. Other projects are, of course, still on general hold until further notice. 

Recent Fascinations: Shifting Tides and Heading into the Unknown

A lot is changing in my personal life that has me looking back and reflecting on my career as a writer these last few years. Lately, I’ve been wondering where I’m heading on the long road ahead. Before I can get into everything, I guess I need to lay out exactly what the major change coming in my life is. 

For right at four years, I’ve worked for the Mississippi State Legislature. I won’t go into too much detail about what exactly that job has been, that information is out there if you really want it, but that job has, in numerous ways, influenced what I have written over the last handful of years. I don’t say that to mean that I’ve written in genres I wouldn’t normally have written in, or that BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been at this job. Instead, the hard reality of the situation is that, as part of the job, I had to live my life under a non-partisan agreement, meaning I could not, in any meaningful way, engage with politics on a public level. That included, quite intensely, my writing. Well, at the end of this month, I’ll be changing jobs. I’m headed back towards public humanities, the field I went to school for, and I’m so excited. 

So, what does that mean going forward? It means that there are stories I’ve had sidelined for years that I might start workshopping and putting out there again. They were set aside because at their center lies, at least to some degree, some political angle. There is one story I put out under a pseudonym not long ago that I’ll be making publicly available under my own honest name. It also means that things in the background of BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS will be pulled into the forefront in the sequel. There’s a criticism of organized religion in the sequels I planned to downplay originally, but now I imagine I will make that much more central. There’s a lot that will likely change depending on the kinds of things I write. 

There is something else, though, that will likely change about my writing, and that’s how often I will be able to literally sit down and write. During my time at the legislature, there have been moments where I have had whole lunch breaks to write, nearly every day, in fact, and there has been essentially no work required of me outside of the typical 40hr a week schedule. This new job will require a lot more travel, a lot more being out and about with the public. All of that is great, it’s what I went to school for, but it also means there will be fewer days where I can write for an hour or more uninterrupted. I may, more often than not, revert back to my college days of being a weekend-only writer, and I think it’s pretty obvious how that will affect everything. It’s going to slow me down quite a bit. 

That doesn’t mean that I’m going to be focusing on writing less, it just means that my output may slow. This newsletter may be late more often, it may end up going quarterly instead of monthly if things get bad enough. It might, also, mean that some events from August and September get rescheduled or moved around, but that will be clearer in the future. I plan, or hope, to do everything I can to prevent too much of that kind of thing. 

All in all though, the coming changes will be positive, I believe, and I feel confident in saying that the quality and the honesty of my writing will be better in the future. Regardless, though, I thank each and every one of you for coming on this journey with me. 

Thanks for reading. 

February ‘25: Indie Author Marketing

Thanks for reading! 

Any support, even just giving these posts a read, is always appreciated.

Recent Updates: 

The covers for BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS are completed. Check them out HERE (http://billyloperhistory.com/uncategorized/cover-reveal-beyond-the-ruined-nights/). 

BRN will be coming AUGUST 16, 2025! 

The Song Has Yet to be Sung. 

Project Progress:

I’m 30k words into SONG OF CALARINE BOOK II, and plugging along. I’m in no rush to finish this one until BRN is out and in my hands, so don’t expect rapid progress until then. 

As far as the other projects I’ve mentioned, they’re all still on hold, and will be until BRN is published and Book II has a completed rough draft. 

Recent Fascinations: The Existential Horrors of Indie Author Marketing

I waffled back and forth on a lot of topics for this month’s post. For a while, I thought about talking a little about how much I love “rugged artists”, people like Cormac McCarthy, Hemingway, Thoreau, but eventually decided against it because it was too esoteric. Maybe for another month. 

I finally settled on this post, which is just a little talk about how much I hate marketing as an indie author. This is, mostly, going to be something I rehash as part of a larger social-media focused essay I am planning, but this one will also be a little more practical and a little less academic than I expect that eventual essay to be. I know not everyone who reads these is a writer, but I hope you at least get some enjoyment out of it. Most of all, I hope you learn why it is so important to support indie authors however you can. 

It is no particular secret that I have a very real disdain for social media as a broad concept. I try to stay off of it, a thing that I have managed (for the most part) in my personal life. But as BRN’s release date grows ever nearer, I’m finding it harder and harder to stay off social media. I feel like I NEED to be pushing my book, to try and get as much traction as I can. This isn’t some unfounded drive. The simple matter is, I can’t depend solely on word of mouth to sell my book. If I want to give it the best chance I can, then I have to push it as often as I can, in as many ways as I can. Even if some of those outlets and methods are mostly negative and mostly irritating. 

Early on in my publishing journey, before I had even decided to actually self publish, I reached out to the wonderful Quinton Li (you should check his work out; you can find it here: https://www.quintonli.com/) to get their perspective on self-publishing and what it takes to, for a  lack of a better turn of phrase, do it right. Quinton gave me a lot of good insights, especially into the general cost of self-publishing, and pretty much all of it has been a great help as I’ve gone further and further along the road to self-publishing BRN. However, one big part of what they told me was that an active social media presence helped, and that setting up a “street team” helped a great deal as well. 

For clarification, a street team, as Quinton described it to me, is a dedicated group of people who are all connected to you on social media and help promote and share your posts related to your upcoming release. In our discussion we didn’t go into a great deal of detail about the analytic results that they saw from this practice, but I think the potential benefits are obvious. Using a street team would quite easily prevent any of your posts from dying without getting any attention or traction. For me, the benefit was so obvious that I immediately started making plans to build my own street team, including making a cursory list of names that I planned to reach out to. 

However, this is one of the many, many things that I eventually just let fall by the wayside as I continued on my path. I haven’t built a street team, nor do I have any intention of doing so. It’s not because I don’t think it would be a useful tactic, I do, but because the idea of managing a group of people on when and what to post on social media, frankly, makes me anxious. I struggle enough with how to manage what I post, much less how to successfully do so for an entire group of people. It just felt like too much of a distraction from everything else, and I decided to put it aside. 

This, finally, brings me to the crux of this entry and my overall point: For some people, social media is the last thing they want to worry with, but regardless of that, you have to at least do it SOMETIMES if you want to be an indie author and “do it right”. I am not a chronically online person, at least not in this current phase of my life, and I do not use social media in any personal way. That’s a long story I’ve gone into before, but it comes down to me just not particularly liking social media. So, I’ve had to start looking for other, more productive ways to manage my social media presence as an author, and over time, I’ve found an example that I find very inspiring. 

Beau Johnson

Now, for those of you who aren’t familiar, Beau Johnson is an indie author who writes neo-noir crime fiction that is some of the best stuff you can find on the indie space, and really one of the strongest writers in the genre, period (check him out here https://www.bishopriderbooks.com/). Beau’s presence on social media, to me, is interesting, because he’s taken a pretty unique approach of leaning hard into the gritty, indie author aesthetic. Here’s an example:

This faux magazine cover marketing idea has always struck me as really cool, and fitting for the vibes of his stories. It brings to mind the idea of gritty exploitation films from the 70s, of Charles Bronson stalking through the streets of a city cast in fog, hellbent on vengeance. It really captures everything you need to know about his stories, while also providing a fun, digestible social media post. This is the kind of thing I never, ever would have thought of. 

Johnson’s social media presence also isn’t JUST these clever kinds of posts. He has also cultivated a very particular culture around his online presence. It’s never doom and gloom, it’s never caustic, it’s never antagonistic. Regardless of what’s going on in the world, Johnson always takes the time to post something positive. To provide a ray of hope, to uplift other authors. I can’t think of a single time that a post from Johnson has made me feel worse, they always bring a smile to my face in one way or another. 

Now, I’m not going through all of this about Johnson’s social media presence just to praise him for his personal marketing strategies (which deserve praise), but also to show what I see as a, at least from the outside, healthy and successful indie marketing strategy. I’m not sure if I’m going to give this faux magazine cover thing a go, but I wanted to bring it to everyone’s attention while also shining a light on a writer I like. 

All of this is to say that: marketing is a real stressful part of being an indie author. Planning events, planning social media posts, and managing the publication of your book is a lot, and it all forces you to wear a lot of hats. It’s an existentially exhausting process, and any support, even just a share or a like or telling a friend, is so important. 

So, if you have a writer you like, and they announce something or share some news, help them out. Share it. 

You have no idea how much it means. 

Thanks for reading.