Category: Uncategorized

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 70%. Slow and steady and all that. 

Recent Fascinations | The Fiction Books that Made Me #10: WOLVES OF THE CALLA

Want to understand what this series is? Go Here 

“I wanted to say goodbye to someone, and have someone say goodbye to me. The goodbyes we speak and the goodbyes we hear are the goodbyes that tell us we´re still alive.”

How fitting that we start this series with not only a Stephen King novel, but a DARK TOWER novel. THE DARK TOWER V: WOLVES OF THE CALLA. While this isn’t the only King book that I’ll be talking about in this series (there’s four and I’m not sorry), it is the only DARK TOWER novel that made my list of 10. For some of you that know me (and know me very well, ya ken?), this might be a surprise, so let me explain. 

THE DARK TOWER is, without any exaggeration, my favorite series of all time. There is seldom a day that the series doesn’t cross my mind in one way or another. I measure myself against it, I measure any new series I read against it. If taken as a whole, the series would be number one, far beyond anything else that is on this list, but I did not consider the series as a single work, and instead was tasked with picking my single favorite book. WOLVES won out, after very little deliberation. In consideration of this list, and how much impact they have had against me, I decided to place it at 10, because that’s where it feels most right when taken on its own merits and the rest of the context of the series is removed. 

So then, what makes WOLVES my favorite of the series? And beyond that, what makes it so important to me? Let’s tackle those one at a time. 

I am, to put it lightly, a huge fan of Westerns. Exactly why, and to the extreme degree with which, I love this genre will be discussed in great detail in a later entry of this series, but this fact influenced my love for WOLVES a great deal the first time I read it. While the western motif is carried through the entirety of THE DARK TOWER series, no book does so more openly, more directly, than WOLVES OF THE CALLA. The book is King’s interpretation of the famous, and often imitated, Akira Kurosawa film SEVEN SAMURAI, which was remade as the landmark Western THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN in 1960. While I respect the original, the American Western version of the story has been one of my favorite movies for as long as I can remember, a love that was passed down to me by my father. WOLVES is an adaptation of this motif, the gathering of the “seven”, the outsider bandits that have tormented the little town for generations, this time in the form of…well. 

Doombot werewolves throwing Green Goblin-esque bombs inspired by the snitch from Harry Potter. 

Look, I didn’t say the book wasn’t also very, very silly. Beyond this thematic connection to one of my favorite movies, and in my opinions one of the best motifs in all of fiction, WOLVES is also a stealth sequel to one of my favorite King novels (one that did not make this list but all the same lives in my heart), SALEM’S LOT. I won’t go into exactly how it works as a sequel, but it does so in an exciting and unique way that really works for me as a reader, but more importantly it gave me a lot of ideas as a writer. 

That leads me to the second piece of this particular story that ended up making it so important to me: the inspiration it gave me to work on my own series, THE SONG OF CALARINE. My books, short stories, and other fictional works all take place in a single shared cosmos. I hesitate to use the word “multiverse”, in no small part because of how Marvel oversaturated the world to that idea, but in essence that is exactly what it is. BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS, my recent debut Southern Dark Fantasy novel, is set in the same world as my short stories, though divided by the veil of the universes and eons of time. While from the earliest moments it is clear that the DARK TOWER takes place in a universe of many worlds, “There are other worlds than these,” after all, it was WOLVES that showed me just how far that idea could be taken. While the following two books, SONGS OF SUSANNAH and THE DARK TOWER took the idea even further, it was the little weird western featuring a malfunctioning robot, a catholic priest, and a frisbee slinging, wheelchair bound badass that told me one absolute truth: write what you want, just make sure it kicks ass. 

At the end of the day, that’s why WOLVES OF THE CALLA took the number 10 spot when so many other books could have ended up here. Some books remind us of our fathers, of the little joys in life. Of Steve McQueen with a sly grin and a fast gun. Most of all, of the worlds possible, both those around us and those within us. 

What more can you ask from a book than to show you what lies ahead at the same time that it shows you what you’ve left behind?

Ya ken?

Thanks for reading, Sai. Long days and pleasant nights. 

Thanks for Reading!

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

Recent Updates:

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:

Publication of BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS is on track! 

Still not much progress on book 2, far too distracted. 

All other projects are still on hold. 

Recent Fascinations: The Final Month of Waiting

What else could I talk about in July other than the coming storm of August?

I thought about starting a new running series, a month by month breakdown of the books that have shaped me, but as I sat down to start working on this month’s newsletter, I found it impossible to think of anything besides AUGUST. 

Next month, my book comes into this world, despite the screaming, the tears, the mental breakdowns that have happened since I first put words on the page back in 2021. Despite the continued chaos in the world around me, my little beautiful story about found family and Mississippi and standing up for what you believe in will come into this world on a hot Summer Saturday. What more could I have ever asked for in life than this?

At this point, the trepidation is beginning to give way to pure excitement. I can’t wait to sit across a table from potential readers, pitching my book to them. Even if it is just a handful of them, even just one, I know that that feeling will be an absolute life changer. Still, of course, I am also feeling that constant growing sense of terror. One person would be an honor, but what will NO people be? Is that possible, even though I have done everything that I can. I don’t think that there’s any real risk of my launch being so catastrophic, but of course logic isn’t quite the ruling emotion during something as momentous as a debut novel. 

In this moment before the release of my novel, though, I struggle to find something to say that I haven’t said so far. I’ve talked about my plans, what I hope to accomplish, the processes that brought me to self-publishing. At this point, I think the main thing I haven’t talked about yet is the primary inspirations that brought BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS into being.

One of the great frustrations of any author is the perennial question “Where do you get your ideas?” This will not be an exploration of where I got the “idea”, as if there could ever be a single origin point, but instead an exploration of the more nuanced influences that are present in the pages of BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS. This will be spoiler free, and will focus on big picture ideas. In order to break it up into more manageable concepts, I’m going to talk about my inspirations on the various elements of the book. Starting with: 

Setting:

I think that out of everything, this is the most obvious to anyone who goes into the story knowing me. The setting of BRN was inspired by, top to bottom, the Jackson Metro. 

At the time I started writing the book, I was not living in the metro, but had just started working in Downtown Jackson for the State Legislature (god help me what a hell of a job that was), and the surrounding area was front and center in my mind. 

However, anyone coming into the story with any concrete knowledge of the metro will recognize immediately that something is off. The names “Calarine” and “Varinz” are, as far as I know, made up and not inspired by anything from reality. While local landmarks are referenced, nothing is exactly as it should be. There is no “Risen Range” outside of the metro. 

For me, exploring the region through this process of manipulation and change was an absolute blast, and by far the best part of writing the book. 

However, there is one big part of the setting that might, for local readers, stand out like a sore thumb. 

The Belhaven. 

For readers not from the Jackson Metro, the name Belhaven might not mean much. For locals, though, Belhaven is a neighborhood and university in the area. However, astute readers will notice that it is categorically impossible for any library at Belhaven university to BE the Belhaven of BRN. What exactly IS the Belhaven’s history, and more broadly, why is this area called the Calarine Ruins instead of some other identifiable part of the Metro? Well, I’d say just read the books, but I’m afraid those particular mysteries won’t be explored for a few more entries in the series. I will give a concrete statement that: The Belhaven of BRN is not Belhaven University, or anything in Jackson. Geographically, the university, and Calarine as a whole, do not fall within the bounderies of the City of Jackson. 

That’s as much as I’m willing to say, but don’t worry, I promise it’s all worth it. In the meantime, the best thing to do with the setting of BRN, and especially the Belhaven, is just take it as casual anachronism, and maybe try to piece together exactly what happened to this world to make everything turn out how it has. 

Characters:

This conversation is a little more complicated. 

There are a great many characters in the books I can’t discuss at all, because to do so would be to provide so many spoilers that it would make the book near-pointless. So, I’m going to stick to discussing the two of the main characters, Sarah and Sibella. 

Sarah is a character with a lot going on. Several people in my life have asked me who I based her on, and there has been a lot of speculation on that, but I’m afraid I will never be able to give any real, concrete answer. The reality is that Sarah came into being on her own, and was helped along in no small part by my editor, who helped me fill in the voids present in her character in the first draft. 

There are parts of myself that I used in the creation of Sarah’s character, though. Her anxiety and mental spirals are very much pulled from my own mental health struggles. Her fears, frustration, and grief over her past are also, at least in part, based on pieces of my own life I find frustrating or shameful. Perhaps, though, the thing that is most heavily based in my own experience is her penchant for blind, foolish overconfidence. More than once I have, to borrow a phrase from Andy Griffith, gotten my britches caught in my own pitchfork. While exactly what happens to Sarah because of her overconfidence is beyond what I myself have experienced, those decisions are based almost entirely on my own past behavior. Her casual bullheadedness is based on no single person, but a broader concept of how I remember myself and so many others behaving at 19. Her apperance is another thing from nowhere, pulled together from disparate places to form a single character. 

Sibella, however, is a much easier character to unpack. The inspiration for a “magic falcon made of paper” is quite obvious for anyone who’s ever seen THE PAGEMASTER. The idea of animate creatures made from the pages of books inside a massive library has always stuck with me, and that image was front and center as I crafted Sibella. Originally, he was supposed to be an owl, but after further consideration of what a nocturnal life cycle would mean for the plot of the book, I shifted away from that to a Peregrine Falcon. Looking back now, I think I would choose a Red Tailed Hawk, native to Mississippi if given a second pass at the first draft, but by the time I thought of that, Sibella’s identity as a falcon is too deeply rooted in his character and my own internal image of him. I do think, though, his non-nativeness to the enviornment around him will become something I address in a future book. 

Also, to air out a part of his character that was not on purpose: No, when I created him I did not know that Sibella was a Greek word for a prophetess. I also did not remember the female vampire character from Scooby-Doo GHOUL SCHOOL, though I have seen that movie. It was all happenstance. I thought of the name Sibella and it stuck. It is absolutely possible that the name was rattling around in my head from something I read about Ancient Greece or that movie, but if pressed at the moment, I would have claimed the name was my own invention. Perhaps this little mix up will make it into the story somewhere in later entries, we’ll see. 

Those are the only two places I’m going to go into any real detail on my inspiration. I thought about including sections on the plot and world building, but I think discussing either of those subjects in too much detail will pull some of the magic out of the story itself, so sorry. Maybe when book 2 is closer to release, we can have that conversation, but not just yet. 

For now though, I think that about covers it. I can’t wait for all of you to read this book. I hope you love it at least half as much as I do. 

Thanks for Reading. 

Thanks for Reading!

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

Recent Updates:

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:

Publication for BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS is still on track!

I haven’t made much more progress on Book 2, because I’ve been tied up with publishing stuff. 

Other projects are still currently on hold. 

At the June Meeting for the private writer’s group I run in the Jackson Metro, during the critique of a member’s work, we ended up discussing the finer (one might even say granular) details of the Fantasy Genre. That is to say, the many, many, many, sub and micro Genres that actually make up the big, umbrella term of FANTASY. 

Recent Fascinations: Too Many Damn Genres

What I’m really saying here is that, as someone who is both fascinated by the nuances of genre as a whole, and someone who is intimately invested in the terminology, I started asking particularly…specific questions about the piece. The piece was great, by the way, but as I asked my questions I realized that the other writers in the meeting didn’t quite see them as absolutely vital questions. That isn’t to say that I think genre terminology is some ironclad topic that should always be treated as the most important piece of the writing process. Instead, I think it is more of a marketing necessity, and one that the previous generations of Fantasy writers did not have to deal with. 

That isn’t to say that there hasn’t always been genre delineation. Speculative Fiction, the old man genre that eventually split off into Science Fiction and Fantasy, which nowadays is reserved for more “literary fiction”, was in and of itself a term to help categorize the various books out there. Once Fantasy found its true footing, really around the time of the publication of LORD OF THE RINGS, the greater genre delineation started to become common knowledge. 

For decades, the core terminology worked as follows:

• Epic Fantasy-Wide spanning, epic worlds, end of the world stakes. Example: LORD OF THE RINGS. 
• Heroic Fantasy-A single, heroic figure versus the forces of evil. Example: Conan the Barbarian and Elric of Melnibone.
• Urban Fantasy-Fantasy set in the “real” world, typically more grounded. Example: The Dresden Files. 

Of course, there were always conversations around what fell into what sub-genre, and where things like DUNE belonged, which eventually spawned its own subgenre of Sci-Fantasy along with a handful of others. For the most part, though, these categories were embraced by publishers and turned into usable, categorizable things, things that readers could at least partly rely on to describe the book they were planning to read, and handy labels that writers could use to quickly give a sense of the tone or feel of their work.

Since about the 80s and 90s, though, things have started to get a little more complicated. Sticking to fantasy for the sake of this particular discussion, there were a number of things that started to happen that further muddied the waters. First was the specification around what LEVEL of magic a story dealt with. Terms like “high” and “low” fantasy came to define entire sects of the genre. The more overt the magic, the closer it came to “high” fantasy. Then,  when writers like Glen Cook and George R.R. Martin popularized the “Grimdark” genre, which focuses on low magic, epic stakes, and gritty character portrayal, the tendency to micro-name genres started becoming more and more common. This only became infinitely more complicated in the late 2010s and the early 2020s when short form social media content created an entirely new type of fiction analysis, one hyper-focused on categorizing more and more specific genre traits in an effort to identify the crux of a readers taste, eventually, or at least possibly, removing the possibility of a “disappointing read.”

Regardless of what anyone may think of this desire to cull out any potential bad reads, I think it’s a horrible idea for the record, especially for writers, one undeniable fact is that it has led to an explosion of micro-genres. 

A handful of examples:

Romantasy, a combination of fantasy and romance, where the romance is as central as the rest of the plot elements. It has its own host of sub-sub genres. (i.e. ACOTAR)

Magepunk, a type of fantasy combining elements of the steampunk genre with high magic. Partly popularized by fantasy titan Brandon Sanderson, it’s another genre that is easing up to the line of science fiction in a way that often makes the science fiction hardliners very irritated. (i.e. Mistborn and Arcane)

Cozy Fantasy, which takes the traits of slice of life anime and injects it into a western fantasy setting. This one, I think, anyway, is the most recent example of an industry disruptor and seems to be growing in popularity day after day. (i.e. Legends and Lattes)

LitRPG, a sub-genre focused on the DND-like progression aspects of fantasy. This genre is another that is currently taking the world by storm, despite having been around for more than a decade. (i.e. Dungeon Crawler Carl)

I could go on and on, listing increasingly obscur sub genres, but I think the point comes across fine with just this handful. Fantasy, and on a broader scale, all genres of fiction, have started to fracture into more and more specific subcategories. 

Now, all of this isn’t to rant unobstructed to a captive audience about why I hate what social media did not genre fiction, that’s another conversation entirely. Instead, what I’ve been building up to is this:

The limit has been met on genre categories and their usefulness as marketing terms, and even publishing and distribution companies are realizing it. 

For example, my book is decidedly sci-fantasy, but that term has never been accepted by publishers, so when I prepared to publish it, that option didn’t exist. So, in turn, I was stuck going with the decidedly less attractive “Dark Fantasy”, which isn’t even a sub-genre I’ve gone over today. It is, by whatever definition you find, essentially fantasy imbued with at least some degree of horror elements. However, because of the degree of magic in my story, it is high fantasy. So is it then a high dark fantasy? Well, that isn’t an option. So I either have to choose high fantasy, or dark fantasy. Since my story isn’t set in a medieval-appearing world, I went with Dark fantasy, and I’m decidedly not happy about it. 

How would I define my own work? Southern sci-fantasy, quite plain and simple. Or, more tightly, just Mississippi Fantasy. But that’s too specific, and again not available on publishing platforms. 

What I believe is that we have hit a kind of singularity on genre division. Publishers are beginning to find the divided terms less and less useful, writers are struggling to define their work using the more nuanced modern terminology, and social media communities are steadily fragmenting into increasingly siloed, specific in-groups that revolve around a single set of genre tropes. 

Where does that leave me? I think, for SONG OF CALARINE, I’ll stick with the Southern Dark Fantasy idea, and rely on marketing materials to drive home that there’s sci-fi elements. I don’t really know where it leaves the broader landscape, and I’m not sure what direction this sort of thing is heading. Could a collapse of genre terminology be in the future? Almost definitely, as the term and tropes begin to hit critical mass, but what comes out on the other side, I have no idea. 

Maybe some of the writers working in these experimental micro-genres like solarpunk and hopepunk and so many others will be lauded as the heralds of the future major genres. 

I guess we’ll see, but regardless of what happens, I’ll always be here. Writing, mostly, about Mississippi. 

Thanks for reading. 

April ‘25: A World Under Attack

Thanks for reading! 

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

Recent Updates:

No new updates. 

BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS is on Storygraph and Goodreads. Add it there. Stay posted as release month gets closer! 

Project Progress:

I’m making steady progress on Song of Calarine Book. I’m about halfway done with the rough draft of it. 

Publication process for BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS is plodding steadily along, and I’m still on schedule to hit my August plan. Ebook preorders will be available early may. 

Additionally, the promised previously released (under a pseudonym) short story is coming in may. I’ve decided to postpone it, as my mental space has been taken up by something we’ll get into in a moment. 

All other projects are still on hold until after I release BRN. 

Recent Fascinations: A World Under Attack, or Why the Humanities Matter

Last month, when I sent my newsletter out, I mentioned shifting to a new job and how that might lead to me discussing and writing about some more political topics in the future. I didn’t know, when I sent that out, what was immediately ahead, and what was going to be resting so firmly at the center of my mind when I sat down to write April’s newsletter. 

Across the country, humanities organizations are under attack. Both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institution of Museum and Library Services have been the subject of intense federal cuts under the new administration. There’s a lot I could say about this, a lot I could put out there as analysis or description of the situation. I struggle, though, to put together any coherent thoughts not layered with intense, personal anger. I, also, am a little too close to the situation, I think, to provide any real information without it turning into an emotional diatribe. So, if you are reading this, hoping for some detailed, analytical piece of journalism on the topic, I am sorry to disappoint. 

However, I feel I have a responsibility to be sure you all understand what is happening and what the situation is.  In Mississippi, the Mississippi Humanities Council has had its funding from NEH completely cut off, and libraries and museums across the state are in limbo while federal funding from IMLS sits frozen. I know, though, that I can’t make any of you (those of you who don’t already) care by talking about funding and bureaucratic nuances. I won’t appease the better parts of your collective humanity, or ask you to call your political representatives, either. I hope that is something you’re already doing and I hope, if you’re here reading this, that you do not need me to plead with you to understand why attacking libraries and museums is, without question, bad. 

History is littered with regimes who have attacked the humanities and the arts. Books were burned in Berlin streets in Nazi Germany and paintings were destroyed. In the 1800s, in our own nation, generations of cultural art were destroyed as Native Americans were forced from their homes and onto the Trail of Tears. I grew up in the tiny, tiny town of Seminary, Mississippi. I wasn’t the best student, not by any measure, but as I sit here in this unprecedented time, I have found myself thinking back to those earliest moments in that rural Mississippi town during the early 00s. 

In that school, I was taught that people are fundamentally good. I was taught that oppression, of any kind, is undeniably wrong. I was taught, by everyone in my life, that anyone who tries to suppress what you read, what art you enjoy, is up to no good. Beyond that little school, my mother taught me a few things about this too. That you treat people with patience and respect. That there is never an excuse for hate. That, under no circumstance, should you EVER apologize for caring. 

She taught me too, that burning books, or any of its near cousins, was an ultimate evil. Perhaps, if more of these ignorant, angry fools had a mother like mine, or teachers like I did, then we wouldn’t be here. They wouldn’t be ashamed of the art around them that makes them so thoroughly question themselves that they reject it with deep, blind horror. With violence. 

The humanities, art, and honest, accurate history, are no threat to you, unless you feel you have something to hide. Or, perhaps more horrifying, you feel that you, and those like you, are better than others. That you have a duty to suppress the other. I don’t know where things are headed, where we (America) will end up, and despite my tendency towards pretentious pontification, I won’t hazard a guess. 

Instead, I think the last thing I want to leave you with is that same advice my mother gave me. Don’t hate, dont apologize for caring, and don’t let the bastards pull the wool over your eyes. 

And remember, the people who are trying to tell you what you can read and who you can love are ALWAYS the ones up to no good. 

A Final Aside: Love is the Uniter

When I wrote the above section of this newsletter, it was early April, and the news on the MHC was fresh. I was, I think you can tell, angry. I was, and in some ways still am, hurt by the actions of the world I see unfolding in front of me. But I think in the text, the anger is most prevelant. I wrote that piece as someone angry, furious, looking for a fight. Part of me is hesitant to publish it now as I write this new addendum in late April. The compilation of this newsletter took longer than I anticipated, and since then my anger has cooled, if only a little. To be clear, I still feel upset at what I see, at these attacks on institutions I hold dear. I am still worried about what this means for my home, our world. But, I think the anger in the above is just that, more anger. More flame. More fury. It is the anger there, the harshness in my words, the absolutism, that makes me hesitant to publish it. I think, though, that I owe that anger its vent. I owe my friends at MHC that anger. 

Still, I don’t want to end this thing on some message of anger, some grandstand about standing up to tyrants and liars and manufactured pretense about my moral raising. In the interim between that original writing and what came later, I’ve thought a lot about what remains to be said. What is the alternative to what I see going on in the world around me? Finally, I think I have at least some answer that satisfies me. 

Love. 

Go for long walks and watch the way the trees move in the wind.

Stand at the edge of  the Pearl River or the Okatoma or the Leaf or the Pascagoula or wherever you are and watch the way it moves.

If you are a parent, hold your child a little longer. If they make you angry or frustrated, revel in that human, beautiful emotion. 

If you are lucky enough to still have living grandparents, call them. Ask them how they are. Tell them you love them. 

Talk to your parents about little things, about the weekend, and the weather. Be near them, love them.

Call a friend to tell them you love them for no reason besides it’s true. 

Plant a garden, and when the harvest comes, share the fruits of your labor with friends, with coworkers, with a neighbor who’s name you don’t know. 

Read a good book.

Watch a movie you love but haven’t seen since highschool. 

Really, what I’m trying to say, is to live. Live a real, human existence. Love yourself, your family, your neighbors. Regardless of what bad news there is, love. 

In my life, for all of my life, I have had a propensity to declare my hate for something at any moment. A hatred for a person, a hatred for a thing, a hatred for a concept. More than once in my life, people have commented on that, and I’ve brushed it off, but now, in a world where so much hate is real and palatable, I find myself weary of my own behavior. My hate. 

I know that this might read as somehow worse than the pretentious moral absolutism of the earlier section. It might be something saccharine, soft hearted. Those behaviors are not something I tend to default toward, but in times like these, I think often of a quote from Tolkien: 

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

With whatever time I have, I don’t want to hate anymore. All I want, quite simply, is to love. 

What greater act of resistance could there be than to Love in the face of Hate?

Thanks for Reading. 

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

Thanks for reading! 

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. 

Even the bad. 

Even the hard. 

Thanks for Reading. 

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. 

Thanks for Reading.

Thanks for reading! 

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.

Thanks for reading. 

Thanks for reading! 

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. 

Thanks for reading.