Feeding the Beast

I need to write a blog post.

That is, unfortunately, the entirety of my inspiration for this week’s blog post.

I’ve been doing this long enough that I have written about writing, editing, publishing, marketing, worldbuilding, research, rejection, reviews, sales, failure, success, characters, covers, maps, mistakes, lessons learned, things I wish I had known, things I apparently learned and then forgot, and probably several subjects I have unknowingly written about twice.

At some point, a blog becomes less about I have something to say and more about Saturday is here again.

I think what keeps some people following my journey is my honesty. It may also be why others have drifted away. But it is who I am, and I don’t want this little hobby to change that.

That realization has already impacted how I approach this site.

I recently decided to discontinue Flashback Fridays. I liked the idea of revisiting older posts and giving them a second life. It had a good run for 14 weeks, but the numbers suggested that what I hoped would happen wasn’t really happening. A Flashback Friday might get 25 views, while only 2-3 people actually click through to the older post. Worse, I began to suspect that posting on Friday was cannibalizing the regular Saturday post as those views began to drop. At some point, maintaining a feature simply because I had been maintaining it no longer made much sense.

My past posts are still available here if you want to continue to explore.

Which brings me, somewhat inevitably, to where I am now.

I’m nearing the end of the long road of Sylvanus: Swords and Sons, and I am genuinely excited about it. As I find myself always saying at this point, I think it has the potential to be some of my best work. That might just be the excitement of the moment, but certainly, I am a better writer than I was when I started publishing six years ago, and I think it is reflected in this book. I understand my characters better. I understand my world better. I am more patient with scenes, more ruthless with bad prose, and slightly less likely to mistake writing a lot of words for writing the correct ones.

By most measures that matter to the craft, I should be feeling pretty good seeing the fruits of my labor take their final form.

It is inevitably tempered by the commercial side of this beast.

As I’ve discussed before, my visibility has dropped considerably, sales have followed, and after six years of doing this, I am actually selling fewer books than I did when I started. That is not the trajectory I expected.

Like any reasonably human being, I assumed the process would compound. More books would bring more readers. More readers would lead to stronger launches. Even modest gains, repeated often enough, should eventually add up to something.

Instead, each new release can still feel strangely close to starting over.

I’ve spent years trying the usual things—advertising, promotions, keyword research, giveaways, newsletters, social media, ARC reviews, blogging—and some helped briefly while others accomplished very little. I never expected success to be guaranteed, but I did expect six years of sustained effort to leave me further along commercially than this.

I could spend several more paragraphs on that. In fact, you should have seen the first version of this post. But I don’t want to dwell on it. I’ve already spent enough time staring at what hasn’t worked.

What interests me more now is the strange fact that the creative side has moved in exactly the opposite direction. Through all the difficulties, I still have an uncontrollable desire to write.

I’m just finishing Sylvanus, and the next book in the Blood and Banners series, Erikini, is already waiting impatiently in the wings—outline drafted and ready to roar. Two more books are needed to complete the main AMS series. There is another Thanatos novel partially written, another after that, and more stories in Lucardia than I am likely to get through anytime soon.

If anything, by focusing less on selling my work, I am writing more. That has made me think differently about why I am doing this. I’m not just saying it is all about the writing to make myself feel better anymore. I am actually feeling it.

Maybe it is because I have stopped expecting the commercial side to justify the work. Somewhere along the way, the work itself became reason enough to continue. Not enough to make me indifferent to everything else. I am nowhere near that enlightened. But my own love of these stories will ensure they find their way to the page.

And that is where Sylvanus comes in.

I am preparing to release it at probably the lowest commercial point of my writing career, and I am excited about it anyway.

Not because I have stopped caring whether people read it. Quite the opposite. I would absolutely love for people to read Sylvanus. Telling a story around a campfire alone doesn’t have the same impact and, frankly, is a little creepy. I want people to meet this version of the character, take the journey with him, and see where it fits into the larger story I have been building for years.

There is also something worth celebrating beyond the release itself.

Sylvanus will be my ninth full-length novel set in Lucardia and my eleventh published work overall. When I first started building this world, that number would have seemed absurdly ambitious. Now there are eight Lucardian novels behind me, with another nearly ready to go out into the world.

More importantly, Sylvanus advances the larger story in a meaningful way. It is a true sequel to Koen: Quills from the Raven’s Nest, without being dependent on it, and it ties into the entire Lucardian universe in ways both apparent and hidden.

Each of these books tells its own tale, but each also puts another piece into a much larger puzzle. Sylvanus now opens the door fully for Erikini. Once that book is finished, the Blood and Banners prequel series will be complete—and finally finishing a series means a lot to me as a writer.

From there, the road leads back to AMS and the final two books of that series. Finishing those will complete the larger ten-book story arc I began all those years ago.

There is still a great deal of writing to be done between here and there. I’ve learned enough by now not to describe a half-million-plus unwritten words as “almost finished.” But I can see the shape of it now. There are fewer unknowns, and I am left with just putting words on the page. I’ve proven I can do that time and time again. It is only a matter of time.

Sure, the readership may not be where I hoped it would be. The sales certainly aren’t. But the books exist. The world has grown. The story has moved forward. What was once an enormous, vague plan swirling around my big head is gradually becoming something complete and real.

That is worth celebrating.

So perhaps that is where I am right now. Flashback Fridays weren’t working, so they’re gone, and other experiments will probably follow. I am becoming much less interested in feeding things simply because I’ve always fed them. The writing is different. I still hope Sylvanus finds readers, that Erikini finds more, and that someday the audience catches up with the work. But I am also allowing myself to appreciate what is already here: nine Lucardian novels, eleven published works, a prequel series nearly complete, and a larger story that is finally beginning to look finite.

There is more work to do. I have a very special ARC reader working through Sylvanus now, pushing it, sometimes painfully, toward the best book it can be. And next Saturday, another blog post waits.

Hopefully, by then I’ll have something more exciting to write about.

Cheers!