Thanks for reading!
Any support, even just giving these posts a read, is always appreciated.
Recent Updates:
No new publication announcements or major updates! Just remember that BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS is coming Summer of THIS YEAR! The Song has yet to be Sung.
Project Progress:
I am working through the rough draft of Song of Calarine Book 2, and am about 100 pages into it, give or take. It’s going to be a long one.
As far as publication status on BRN goes, there is a slight update. After some back and forth with an artist/author friend of mine, I’m going to be getting covers done by them instead of working on them myself! We’re almost done with all of the covers, so we aren’t too far from the cover reveal. Stay tuned for that!
Recent Fascinations: The Vagabond Month
Welcome to 2025.
This year is set to be a pretty wild year for me. As all y’all have to know by now, my debut novel BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS is set to release this Summer. I’m pretty confident at this point that meeting that projected release season won’t be any problem. I’ll be setting a tentative release date in the coming months, around the same time I do the cover reveal, so be watching for that. The release process will keep me pretty busy in the second half of this year, between the events I plan to do in support of it and the push I’ll be making on social media. I’m both excited and terrified, which I think is pretty normal.
Of course, my release of BRN isn’t the only thing that’ll be going on this year, but it’s the primary thing on my mind right now. You’ll find no discussion of politics, one way or the other, here, though I’m sure those sorts of things are dominating people’s minds right now.
In the sci-fi/fantasy/horror space, I’m sure another thing on people’s minds is the recent news story from VULTURE on Neil Gaiman. You can read that article here, but please proceed with caution. The content of it is heavy, exhausting, and terribly upsetting, regardless of whether or not you are/were a fan. I will give no summary. Just know that if you can think of a content warning to apply to a potential news story, it applies to that one. Proceed with caution.
I guess, despite how much I try not to let these sorts of things consume me, the news on Neil Gaiman has been my “recent fascination”. I have talked before about Gaiman’s AMERICAN GODS as my second favorite book of all time for…years. Nearly a decade. I will not parse that out here right now, maybe in February.
Beyond the publication of my own book and the otherwise upsetting SFF/H news, not much has been on my mind. January, for me, is often a kind of transitory period. It is the start of the busy season at my day job, and there’s still a lot of cool down from the holidays going on in my personal life. I often claim February as my period of rest and resetting, that beautiful transitional period from Winter to Spring, which I always enjoy. January, though, is a month of shifting and waning interest. Of rediscovery and personal adjustment.
The Vagabond Month.
One thing that does often lend itself to January is the period of global self reflection in the Western World, with the constant barrage of New Year’s Resolutions. I’m not a resolution person, though I do often take this beginning month to think about the things I’d like to change in the coming year. Most of that is personal, and I won’t share those here. I demand at least some semblance of a private life in this cyberpunk dystopia we live in.
What I will share, though, is my writing plans.
Once I finish up the rough draft of SoC 2, I plan to edit a handful of short stories I have sitting around and submit them for publication. I didn’t publish any new fiction in ‘24, because I was so focused on BRN, but I want to try and get some submissions in before the publishing schedule for my novel gets too strenuous. We’ll see how that goes. Other than that, I think you can expect some sort of new essay here on the effect of social media and what it does to me, my writing, and my experience as a writer in general. Yes, I know I’ve talked about it before. No, I won’t stop.
Otherwise, we’re all headed into a new year, and I think we can only move forward and keep a beautiful line from LONESOME DOVE by Larry McMurtry in mind.
“Yesterday’s gone down the river and you can’t get it back.”
Thanks for reading.
