I’ve recently come to the unfortunate realization that nearly everything I’ve ever been passionate about is something nobody particularly wants to pay me to do. Drawing. Painting. Music. Carpentry. Writing. Apparently, when the universe was distributing interests, I wandered into the arts-and-crafts department and never found my way out. Why couldn’t I have developed aContinue reading “A Passion for the Impractical”
Tag Archives: self-publishing
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, thingsContinue reading “Feeding the Beast”
Flashback Fridays #14
This week’s look to the past was originally published on 8/13/21. I’m posting it again now because it is some good advice and a bit of encouragement that I also need to remember from time to time. Many, if not all, of us seek external validation. But perhaps the most important validation is within yourself.Continue reading “Flashback Fridays #14”
The Words That Remain: Editing Sylvanus
I have spent an enormous amount of time editing Sylvanus: Swords and Sons over the last three weeks. More time than I typically do for pure writing, and probably more than makes rational business sense, but I am in love with this tale and want to make sure it is as good as I canContinue reading “The Words That Remain: Editing Sylvanus”
I Tracked More Than Half a Million Amazon Keyword Rankings. Something Has Changed.
I know I am publishing a post outside my typical blogging schedule, but I’ve been working on this one for a while and feel it deserves a special place. For nearly four years, I have tracked where my books appear in Amazon search results. What began as a fairly simple attempt to understand whether readersContinue reading “I Tracked More Than Half a Million Amazon Keyword Rankings. Something Has Changed.”
Timelines: The Bane of My Existence
There are certain things that keep a writer up at night. Is this character interesting enough? Does this chapter drag? Did I use the word just seventeen times on the same page? And then there is my particular torment: Timelines. My formal Lucardian Timeline covers roughly a thousand years of recorded history, but once youContinue reading “Timelines: The Bane of My Existence”
Retiring The Slaying of the Bull
I have decided to retire The Slaying of the Bull. That is a stranger sentence to write than I expected. I have abandoned story ideas, cut chapters I once loved, killed characters, scrapped outlines, and consigned more than a few half-written manuscripts to folders where they will probably remain until some future archaeologist excavates myContinue reading “Retiring The Slaying of the Bull”
Every Wound Has an Ancestry
As I mentioned in my last post, over the last few weeks, I have been looking backward more than usual. Part of that has come from my Flashback Fridays series, which has forced me to dig through six years of blog posts and revisit the person I was when all of this began. Part ofContinue reading “Every Wound Has an Ancestry”
Flashback Fridays #9
I struggled to find a post to look back on this week. I settled on two that mark the beginning of a transition. In the late summer of 2020, I was entering the doldrums. After the little spurt of sales for The Island of Stone, the numbers tanked, and my strategy for publishing The SlayingContinue reading “Flashback Fridays #9”
The Year I Almost Wrote the Joy Out of Writing
My Flashback Fridays series has forced me to spend a lot of time with a man I barely recognize. He has my name, my memories, and most of my insecurities, but he is standing at the beginning of a road I have now traveled for six years. He has just published Island of Stone. HeContinue reading “The Year I Almost Wrote the Joy Out of Writing”
