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”
Tag Archives: self-publishing
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”
Flashback Fridays #8
This week’s Flashback Friday comes from June 7, 2020, and I chose it because I still need the reminder. When writers first begin, every sentence feels precious. We polish, protect, and defend words simply because we suffered to put them on the page. Cutting them can feel less like editing and more like destroying evidenceContinue reading “Flashback Fridays #8”
Flashback Fridays #7
I skipped a bunch of posts about my writing plans and progress in editing The Slaying of the Bull. They are interesting to me in a documentation way, but since many of those plans changed and The Slaying of the Bull wasn’t the hit I thought it would be at the time, I won’t boreContinue reading “Flashback Fridays #7”
Chasing the Current
Sylvanus: Swords and Sons has now crossed 60,000 words, placing me roughly at the midpoint of the novel. After a long and arduous journey, Sylvanus and his remaining companions are preparing to cross into the Northlands and enter the realm of his brother, Koen. It is a major transition in the story, but also inContinue reading “Chasing the Current”
Flashback Fridays #6
In this week’s look to the past, I focus on the moment I received my first novel in hand. True to the nature of my life, it had a bumpy road getting there (it was a premonition of my future struggles with Amazon), but when it finally arrived, it was something special. Finishing a bookContinue reading “Flashback Fridays #6”
Lament for the loss of data
Six years into self-publishing, what surprises me most is not how hard it is. Hard is fine. Hard can be endured. I’m no spring chicken. I have faced many hardships in life, and I know how to deal with them. What wears on a person is trying to build on unstable ground, especially when youContinue reading “Lament for the loss of data”
I swam the market until I hit a rock
I’ve decided to stop my query process for Jezelle: Thief of Forks and switch gears to self-publishing the book. On the surface, that may look like defeat—another swing at traditional publishing and missing—but that’s not what this is. This is me looking directly at how this business actually works, looking at how far Jezelle swamContinue reading “I swam the market until I hit a rock”
