2021, huh? Oof.
I’ve been real quiet the last 24 months or so. Like absolutely everyone, I’ve had ups and downs. Many downs. But a few solid ups, too.
Let’s get the biggest personal down out of the way: Parvus Press, who published The Ragged Blade in 2019 and were about to follow it up with The Tarnished King in mid-2020, were forced to close their doors in mid-2021. The Tarnished King never made it to print. All the rights have been returned to me. This means I’m sitting on two pretty great, completed fantasy novels and a 1st draft of book 3, but I don’t know what to do with them. Query other publishers? Self-pub? And how do you get the energy to dive into extensive edits on a series with no support from your previous editor? I don’t know. It’s hard, friends.
Other downs: I still haven’t finished a 1st draft of Rust Five (although it IS moving along!) and never found an agent for God Factory (although the contacts I made while querying that manuscript have been wonderful and incredibly encouraging).
But, how about the ups!
I wrote over 800,000 words of fiction in 2020 and another 500,000 in 2021. I finished writing what I think is the best novel of my career (a massive military wlw fantasy called A Flesh Most Holy And Incandescent). I’m also in the editing stages with a horror novella cowritten with Rich Larson, I’m halfway through a pulpy fantasy novel that’s basically Final Fantasy 7 meets Mad Max meets Vandermeer’s Annihilation, and I have all the foundations in place for what will eventually be my magnum opus - a cosmic-body-horror retelling of the entire French Revolution.
So yes, I’m still writing. Writing more than ever, in fact. I’m not only making my daily bread as editor-in-chief of Emergence Magazine and occasional freelance author of white papers and research documents, but I’m also pumping out some of the best fantasy stories of my life.
But from the outside, it looks like I’m not here at all.
And that’s difficult.
I struggle with this a lot. I went from self-publishing two novels, sixteen novellas and three SFF collections in a handful of years, to almost three years of radio silence. From constant self-promotion to turtling inside my study. It’s a difficult transition and I know I have to reverse it soon, but that’s a pretty big mountain to climb.
I’m not asking for answers. I’ll find them myself. I just have to figure out what sort of author I want to be. In the early 2010s I was dead-set on being a self-published superstar. Then I started writing bigger, more complex books, and I realized I needed to work closely with an agent and editor to make sure these stories were told right. Now that I’m inching closer to finding an agent (A Flesh Most Holy seems to be getting some good attention, but whether that leads anywhere is impossible to predict!) I’m feeling like I want to find a healthier balance between the two.
I want to write big, twisty books for the traditional market, and pump out fun novellas on the side for self pub. I want to be able to explore all forms of stories, and release them in the format that gets them into the right hands.
Most of all, I want to have fun. And that’s what I’m doing. A Flesh Most Holy And Incandescent was an absolute blast to write, and I hope I can find an agent who experiences that same excitement while reading it. But this weird vampire novella I’m smashing out right now (beta draft on March 1st or bust!) is also just plain fun. And my big French Revolution horror novel? That’s so much fun.
Life’s too short and busy to pump my time into projects that don’t bring me joy. So that’s what I’m doing now, and forever.
I hope you get to read them soon, and that they bring you joy too.