Some Updates: 'Valérian' and a Side Project

So Valérian is more than halfway done, but at the same time, it isn't. And it's making me tear my hair out. I didn't anticipate the story to be this complex, and I think it's because the titular character is actually a side character, which leaves Roland (the book's MC) learning about Valérian's movements in a far-off place at the same time as the readers. 

The book, as I mentioned before, was partly inspired by du Maurier's Rebecca in approach. The difference is that the Rebecca character in my story is still alive, and he's physically separated from his younger brother. But! That's where all the gothic elements also get worked in.

The result is that the book takes longer than usual to sort itself out, and when my usual target chapter count for my long novellas is 26 chapters, the maximum I can give myself is 28. That said, at this rate, I might be looking at 30 chapters, which will bring the total word count to over 50K words. That also defeats my purpose of sticking to the long novella format, which is to sharpen my skills in telling a complete and relatively complex story in a shorter format (also, in terms of pricing, anything over 50K will be given a $2.99 price tag). 

But if the story refuses to stay within my strict parameters, I know I shouldn't fight it. Of course, the revision stage will tell me if reducing the length is possible, and I've hacked longer books down significantly to fit the publisher's length requirements (Icarus in Flight and Arabesque). I suppose, at the end of the day, it's easier for me to cut things out than to add material, so we'll see how things work out. 

At any rate, Valérian is still on track for a Nov. 1 release. 

Now for the side project...

I started working on something last year, and I ended up trunking it after 25K words because it wasn't going anywhere. In late May of this year, though, I decided to resurrect the idea and write a completely new version of it, and it's been a good process for me. In fact, the book's about 2/3 done. Unlike my usual releases, this one doesn't have a target length even if I'd love for it to be no longer than 50K words. If it goes beyond that, it's okay. This book is experimental for me.

And what I mean by that is it's not only a side project, but it's a story that's completely off the beaten track that I decided to tackle because I needed to take myself out of my comfort zone and attempt something I've been curious about but never tried before. 

Now whether or not the book will find an audience is another matter entirely, and I'm not worried about that. Since it's a side project, there's no guarantee that I'll write more books in the same vein. However, if I do, I'll have to work it in my main calendar, which will mean a wider spread of release dates for my Grotesqueries collection. What's now a three-book calendar will have to be a two-book one, and the side project will find its spot somewhere in there.

I'll also be publishing these books (or this current WIP if that's all I'll manage) under a new pen name because of just how far off the beaten track the genre is for me. I'll be posting about it when the time comes, though, so at least visitors to my site will know what's up, and it'll be up to them to decide if they really want to take a chance on that. 

Some trivia, by the way...

A House of Profane Gods was a title I initially gave what I'd first planned for the second book in this side project thing. But when I trunked the first unfinished draft of my WIP, I decided to give the title to my upcoming Grotesqueries book instead. So now I'll have to come up with a new title for that side project if things end up working to my satisfaction. 

So complicated, this writing business. 

August Arrives, Experimentation Ends

This marks the longest break I've had over here, but that had nothing to do with rest and relaxation. On the contrary! 

I put this site on private mode, redirected (hopefully) visitors to my Payhip site as my new home base, but that ended up as well as I'd expected, which was badly. That store, in its second incarnation (I had it up once a couple or so years ago and deleted it), sold nothing. No amount of marketing site-specific sales did anything other than attract bot traffic to it with zero conversions. And that store has been up since the start of the year.

I count that as my second strike, and I'm not going to attempt a third. I know when I'm beaten, and there's no help for it.

So I deleted that site and have sworn off direct sales at this point unless I somehow stumble across the secret to successfully attracting a massive audience of readers to my (extremely niche) books. For a writer who barely sells over at bigger, more established and popular online stores, selling direct is just not going to work. 

Also things have gotten even busier at the day job, believe it or not, and I just don't have any gas in the tank by the end of the day. I can't maintain a store and be creative in my marketing. I've tried just about every sale method and combination Payhip offers creators, and I still failed. So! No more direct sales. I just can't anymore. 

One final attempt at experimentation was setting up a really stripped down single-page site over at Carrd.co (a platform I highly recommend, by the way), but I found I do miss blogging, regardless of consistency. I mean, I'd love to be more consistent and post at least once a week over here, but that remains to be seen, doesn't it, with my day job being the way it is? 

(Not that I'm complaining about the day job, of course -- I'd rather be run off my feet than fruitlessly looking for a job in this economy)

At any rate, after a brief stint away from this dinosaur of a platform, I'm back, and I've once again updated all of the links all over this site and reverted back to my old Books2Read links. 

I did add a new moodboard to my main Book Gallery page, and it contains a mix of images highlighting the kinds of subjects I gravitate toward in my writing (i.e., ghosts, the occult, gay romance, liminal spaces, etc.). I'll also be updating around half of the moodboards in the individual gallery pages as well. 

In fact, I already have the moodboard I plan to use for Valérian's gallery page, but all good things to those who wait. Anyway, there it is. I do have a few writing updates to post this weekend, so stay tuned for that. 

Now Available: 'The Shadow Groom' (Plus Two Sales!)

It's out, it's out! Yay! Book number eleven in my Grotesqueries collection is finally here, and I can breathe easy.

All is well and perfect in the world because Errol Bricksworth and Edvin Loyola-Norikova are young (too young), in love (overly so), and betrothed at just nineteen (heaven help everyone). Their families aren't very keen on the idea, and with the help of Errol's beloved Uncle Sorrel, an arrangement is made meant to test the lads' resolve to have their happily-ever-after. 

It does require three months spent in an old, old gatehouse that's not only home to mismatched furnishings, art, and miscellaneous contents spanning centuries, but a few very active ghosts as well. Errol and Edvin are to be the gatehouse's caretakers while Uncle Sorrel, who owns the property, withdraws with his tiny staff to a cozy cottage tucked away in the wood. And for three months, both young men need to get their hands dirty, learn the rudiments of domestic life as a couple (learning how to cook helps), and get used to sharing space with lives long gone. 

Errol and Edvin's youth makes them brave and even reckless as they readily accept the terms, determined to prove those poxy adults wrong. Even those resident ghosts don't bother them, though not all hauntings, apparently, are made the same. Equal parts irritating and unnerving, the ghosts gradually force the lads to think beyond their tiny world of two either through spectral echoes of long-forgotten lives or the quiet guidance of a gentleman known only as "the shadow groom" to former staff. 

The Shadow Groom is a humorous re-imagining of the German folktale "The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was".

For some fun stuff, here's the gallery page for the book, where I share some fun tidbits about the fairy tale that inspired me to work on a re-imagining of it. 

To celebrate the wide release, I'm holding a BOGO-like sale for the book over at my store. When you purchase a copy of The Shadow Groom, you can get any book from my backlist for 60% off, including my long novellas that are usually priced at 99 cents. Getting my books from my Payhip store is the most direct way readers can support my work. This sale, moreover, will continue until my next book is released in November.

Everywhere else, you can go to the book page at Books2Read for all the links to different online bookstores for both digital and print formats. The e-book is priced at 99 cents, and the print book is $9.00 USD. 

Again, thank you for your support, and I hope you enjoy the book! 

---

JULY SALE AT SMASHWORDS 

There's also another sale, but this time an exclusive one over at Smashwords. My entire Arcana Europa, Curiosities, Masks, and miscellaneous collections are 50% off with coupons throughout July. It's not a part of their sitewide sale, but something I specifically put together to coincide with it because I don't want all of my collections to be part of their summer sale. So if you have a Smashwords account, go here to my author page to see what's on offer.

Oh, Hello. There I Am.

I didn't realize I've only posted twice this month. Yikes. But then it's that time of the year when I step back and ease off the gas pedal -- at least where online activity's concerned. Or blogging, anyway. This month's been surprisingly productive off-screen, if you will, with Valérian coming along pretty well, and the notes (and growing number of images for the book's future gallery page) are giving me a lot of fuel for the story's forward momentum.

Oh, hey, it's Roland! (image from Pinterest)

The story's being told from one POV this time a la Doppelgänger, and it's just as dark as said book. With any luck, I'll be able to get all of the creepy stuff out of my system by the time Camera Obscura comes around because that book's supposed to be another comedy (a complete 180 turn from the original story idea).  

I have been pretty busy scouring around for image prompts, and as mentioned before, Pinterest has been a goldmine as far as what I'm hoping to tackle after Liminal Child (in addition to other books in my queue). 

But I've also run across a few sites that have several story prompts based on genre, and I'm hoping they'll still be around once I'm ready to get started on brainstorming and note-taking. I tend to go nuts whenever inspiration strikes, and before I know it, I've got half a dozen story ideas lined up with book covers already put together. Talk about optimism, right? But those book cover images actually light the fire under me, and if I hold on to them, they're always there to remind me about whatever plotbunnies are waiting their turn to be turned into full-blown books.

As of late, I realize I've been saving images of cemetery statues -- not of angels, but something like the ones I posted previously that have gotten me going with Valérian. 

One of a dozen-plus for A House of Profane Gods (image from Pinterest)

The difference, though, is that the images (there are two) that I set aside for Valérian are strictly a solo thing, i.e., the statues represent only one person in the story. But the newer obsession I have involve multiple figures in a variety of poses that run the gamut between sad, creepy, and grotesque. And I do have the germ of a story inspired by those images; however, we're looking at a publication date that's two years from now. Will that idea stick around that long? I've already committed to the next four books on my calendar. I haven't bothered to look beyond them. In fact, I made myself stop.

But, uh... cemetery statues. They need a story.

And there's also that Cupid and Psyche retelling that I want to tackle even though I haven't gotten around to coming up with how best to do that. Too many ideas, I'm telling you, and there's only one of me.  

Next Up: Valérian

So when I said "soon", I clearly meant "in a week, yo". 😶 Yeah, life happened, alas. 

Anyway, I've just started work on Valérian, which is enjoying copious notes-spawning in my notebook. I'm really looking forward to this story as it's been getting pretty expansive in my head, and I've also got some pretty effective musical and visual inspiration for it. 

This image, which I'll be using in the gallery page for the book down the line, has been lurking in my hard drive for a good long time, and it's finally making itself "heard". I know it's most likely AI-generated, but I couldn't find anything else just as fantastical and creepy as hell that's from real-life cemeteries, so I apologize for its usage (to be honest, a lot of the images I've used for my gallery pages were AI-generated, which seems to be the thing now over at Pinterest, my go-to place for visual prompts). 

Then there's this song, which pretty much encapsulates the subject of the book:

I talked about that song as well as "Daniel" in an older post, and as with the image above, they're finally getting the story treatment. When the time comes for the gallery page to be made, it's going to be an embarrassment of riches for me regarding the images that can be used for the moodboard and other things. 

Yay, progress! 

'The Shadow Groom' Gallery Page Now Up

As I'm up to my ears in errands and chores, this'll be a short and sweet post. The gallery page for The Shadow Groom is now up, and there's quite a bit of background stuff I'm sharing with visitors there. Head on yonder for the goodies. 

And I'll be back soon. Maybe not today, no, but soon.  

'The Shadow Groom' Blurb

Getting there! I just finished the first round of revisions and edits, and I'm about to dive right back in for the next round. In the meantime, I submitted the book to Draft2Digital to format, so I can download my proof copy and use it for that purpose (and to have it listed ahead of time for pre-orders).

And along with that comes the book blurb. I was aiming for 250 words maximum, but it ended up blasting past and landing at around 260. At least it's not 300, eh?

All is well and perfect in the world because Errol Bricksworth and Edvin Loyola-Norikova are young (too young), in love (overly so), and betrothed at just nineteen (heaven help everyone). Their families aren’t very keen on the idea, and with the help of Errol’s beloved Uncle Sorrel, an arrangement is made meant to test the lads’ resolve to have their happily-ever-after.

It does require three months spent in an old, old gatehouse that’s not only home to mismatched furnishings, art, and miscellaneous contents spanning centuries, but a few very active ghosts as well. Errol and Edvin are to be the gatehouse’s caretakers while Uncle Sorrel, who owns the property, withdraws with his tiny staff to a cozy cottage tucked away in the wood. And for three months, both young men need to get their hands dirty, learn the rudiments of domestic life as a couple (learning how to cook helps), and get used to sharing space with lives long gone.

Errol and Edvin’s youth makes them brave and even reckless as they readily accept the terms, determined to prove those poxy adults wrong. Even those resident ghosts don’t bother them, though not all hauntings, apparently, are made the same. Equal parts irritating and unnerving, the ghosts gradually force the lads to think beyond their tiny world of two either through spectral echoes of long-forgotten lives or the quiet guidance of a gentleman known only as “the shadow groom” to former staff. 

The Shadow Groom is a humorous re-imagining of the German folktale “The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was”.

As always, there might be some tweaking still for the blurb, but at least it's one significant step forward short of pressing "publish" on my author dashboard.  

Calendar Changes and Updated Cover Art

As I work my way through The Shadow Groom, I'm already sorting out my notes and my book queue. For a while, I had Camera Obscura slated for November 1, but looking through my journal, I'm amassing a hefty amount of (very pushy) notes for Valérian. There are a number of things still needing to sort out with Camera Obscura, and I'm not going to steamroll my way through those missing patches of plot points. Done it before, and it didn't turn out well (see: Eidolon).

To that end, I'm rearranging my publishing calendar and switching dates around. Camera Obscura will be released next year while Valérian will leap frog over A House of Profane Gods (which also has way more notes going for it than Camera Obscura, by the way, but not as many as Valérian) for the November slot. 

The book also enjoyed a bit of an upgrade in its cover art now that it's been shuffled forward to an earlier date (it may still be slightly tweaked, but the elements are staying):

It's certainly much more effective than the first cover art I shared. With all that said, here's the new calendar:

2026 calendar

2027 calendar

With any luck, my notes for Camera Obscura will grow along the way. If not, it'll be switching spots once more with A House of Profane Gods. I've already updated my Book News and Book List pages.

In other news, my new book prices are all set at different online stores EXCEPT for Amazon, which is taking its damn sweet time. If you purchase any of my Grotesqueries books there, you'll still be paying 99 cents until they finally post the new price. 

Been a Week

Hard at work in the revision + editing department for The Shadow Groom. At the same time, notes are already stacking up for the next three books in my queue (Camera Obscura, A House of Profane Gods, and Valérian). In the course of which, by the way, I stumbled across a possible plot bunny for a "Pygmalion" retelling. Seeing as how that one's born from a moment of complete dejection, I'm not sure if it'll happen, but if I were to step back and stay focused and objective, I know I can do it.

If it does happen, it'll be something like a dark fairy tale of sorts. The only sticking point is the very personal nature of its source, if you will. I do have these moments on occasion whenever something triggers a specific thought that never fails to leave me depressed, and up until now, no story idea has ever come out of them. 

I've been drowning myself in books, too -- not that I've ever stopped, but up until the last few months, all of my reading's been done via e-book app. Now I'm doing a mixed bag of print (borrowed library books) and e-book (owned or borrowed), which also includes my Bucket List Reading. So far I've managed to read The War of the Worlds some months ago, and the most recent one was Logan's Run. Sadly, I DNF'd Logan's Run as I couldn't get into it, but there are still so many books out there screaming for my attention. So many books, so little time, and no room for regrets. 

I have Don Quixote somewhere in my queue, but considering the book's heft and text size, I'm going to have to finish the current pile of checked out books first before rolling up my mental sleeves and diving in.

My story ideas notebook is almost filled up, so I'm about to get a fresh one. However, I'm also getting into personal journaling as well as commonplace journaling. What I hope to do is mesh all three in one new notebook as a way of pulling myself off the internet and off my apps for longer and longer stretches of time every day. 

I've seen a number of videos on commonplace notebooks and on journaling, and a few of them seem very performative to me and less about the point of the exercise, which is something a person does privately. Anyway, that's the only beef I have about some of the content I've run across (and still run across), and since I've already dipped my toes into the pool for those two (been keeping a story ideas journal for ages now, so I be an expert on that), I already know how best to approach all three as one unit, using only one notebook. 

Hoping that'll yield dividends in the long run as being online is taxing as all hell, and I'm not getting any younger. At least the story ideas notebook has been my best friend for years, so it's just a matter of stretching my personal writing efforts a little further. 

Exclusive Store Sale Now On (and On and On...)

Just a quick post to let everyone know my store-wide perma-sale is now live. Everything -- save for the two novellas in my Dolores collection -- is marked down for all eternity (rather dramatic-sounding, but that's how it is). 

My books, including new titles, are discounted in tiers. The older the collection, the steeper the price drop. It starts with all the Grotesqueries collection at 60% off, which includes Doppelgänger that came out a couple of months ago (so still a baby). And then it goes up incrementally from there: 60%, 65%, 70%, and 75%. 

I was planning to do a BOGO, but Payhip requires an end date for that kind of sale, so I might as well tackle everything in one fell swoop and leave it be. 

When The Shadow Groom comes out, it'll be part of the perma-sale if you purchase it directly from my store. And so on and so forth. And thank you, as always, for your support.

'The Shadow Groom': Done! (Plus a Few More Things About Ye Olde D2D Drama)

Yeah, firstly, The Shadow Groom is done! First draft is complete, and I left myself a lot of room for additional material meant to clarify a bunch of events in the story. This means the revision phase will be rather hardcore, but it's necessary. 

So in celebration, here's the obligatory happy dance video:

Actually, it's a perfect fit for the story, so I'm running with it. 😁 This book is on track (obvs) for the planned July 1 release, and when it's out, I'll be doing another BOGO sale over at my Payhip store to celebrate its publication.

And speaking of Payhip, I had to re-upload the files to the store because all links and end matter material (other than the "about the author" page) needed to be taken out as they all linked back to Draft2Digital. Books still distributed by them will have those pages and links, but not those I'm selling directly.

I'm still salty about raising my prices for the Grotesqueries books, but I'm also going to balance that out by doing perma-sales at my store. I was at first planning to offer monthly specials, but with my recent pivot, it'll be permanent -- as to what the sale would be, I'm looking at a number of options and still need to decide on which.

I do treat my writing and publishing as a business, which means earnings go back into the pot and pay for stuff I need to keep the machine going. Cover art image licenses, domain name, etc. -- those are supposed to be covered by my royalties, and if D2D will be taking an even bigger chunk off that, either I pay out of pocket with my day job earnings (all of which are already accounted for, budget-wise) or via credit card, which is my last resort if things go down that road. 

Do I regret sprouting roots in niche fiction? No. Never did, never will. But this is the way of things, and I gotta roll with the punches if I wish to stick around and see to the long tail of publishing my books.

Again, a final apology for the price bump for my Grotesqueries books and Ghosts and Tea sequels. If you do prefer to own my books as opposed to borrow them from library platforms or subscription services, keep an eye out for the perma-sale I'll be posting about soon.  

In the meantime, this is the final week for the 80% off sale for my Masks and Miscellanous collections. 

Wherefore Art Thou, Authors?

The thing about being in the thick of writing things is that there's really not much to talk about during that lull. I did pass the 30K-word mark, which usually also starts the paranoia phase of my drafting. I now only have less than 20K words to go to wrap things up, and let me tell you, things go REALLY quickly once that 30K-word line is crossed.

I'm on schedule, and this is going to be a bit of a challenge to revise and edit once the first draft's done.

The folktale I'm basing this on doesn't have a significant resolution, and unlike, say, "The Pied Piper of Hamelin", which I based Compline on, "The Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Is" is a weird -- albeit funny -- story because in the end, the main character (who's as dumb as a rock) STILL doesn't know how to shudder. Oh, his future wife makes him, of course, but it's got nothing to do with fear at all but, rather, cold water.

There's a lot of satire in the original folktale, though, but as to what, exactly, is being made fun of, I'm not really sure. There are only a number of interpretations from psychologists whose take I've never been a fan of. It's an old oral folktale that the Grimm brothers merely collected for their books, so whatever the point is for that story is lost forever, I think. 

The one thing I can say about the main character in the folktale, though, is that as stupid as he is (or one can argue he's just impossibly naive), he actually displays an impressive amount of compassion and empathy. Oh, he's got no understanding that the people he's trying to help are dead, but the need to help is there.

I am taking a lot of elements from the folktale and rewriting them in my own way to fit my version of it. So Errol and Edvin's ages needed to be bumped down a little more than usual, but I'm not marketing this as a YA book. They're both 19, which allows them to be utterly clueless about life and the world and believing the universe revolves around them still. We all know how it was to think we're indestructible. 

Anyway, that lack of a solid point in the original folktale has been difficult to keep out of my own story, and that'll make for a pretty intensive revision phase with maybe a lot of deletions and new material woven in. Or at least it'll take me longer than usual to get that done. 

In reference to this blog post title, I'm wondering about the "old guard" of writers who've been very active for years and then suddenly dropped off everyone's radar (or significantly cut down on their presence everywhere). It's very difficult, keeping writing and publishing up. It's not only hard actually turning words in your head into readable text following a plot that does everything it needs to do, but also go through the rest of the publishing stages of revising, editing, book cover design, marketing, etc. 

The sudden or gradual disappearance of the authors whose books I own and am happy to add to gives me a lot to think about. Things aren't forever, and life happens to everyone. For those authors with a massive following and who enjoy significantly more success than I, I reckon the added pressure of reader expectations can also burn them out eventually. 

I do miss them. I miss their stories and their voices and only now hope they're all doing well. A handful of go-to writers are still writing and publishing fairly consistently, but they're doing so at a markedly slower pace. I've been trawling Smashwords for new voices to discover now, and the proliferation of AI-written books is putting a damper on things. I did get sucked into maybe four books from "authors" I now actively avoid, but I've also discovered one relatively active writer I'll be following. 

I'm still keeping an eye out and hope to run across more of these new writers. Serendipity rules, man. 

April Store Sale

Life's rough, and sales are good. Apologies for forgetting to update both my Payhip store and this blog, but a late day is better than nothing.

So for all of April, my Masks collection as well as my Miscellaneous collection are 80% off. In essence, most of these books are cheaper than my Grotesqueries novellas, so yay!

This sale lasts through -- yep -- the end of April, and it's only happening at my store. So if you'd like to snag a copy or two of whatever books you might have been on the fence about, go to the following pages for them:

Masks (80% off the entire series including the omnibus)

Miscellaneous (80% off the entire series including all the omnibuses)

There'll be another sale (a different one) in May, and I'm trying to make these offers a monthly thing. Hopefully I'll be a hell of a lot more on top of things by the first of May, but I'm me, and life is life. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the books if you do purchase any, and thank you so much for your support! 

 

La Colline Aux Oiseaux

Hello, Sping. The Bay Area just ended Winter with a freaking heat wave, and I'm glad it's over and that we're set to enjoy milder spring weather in the coming days. Seeing as how it's still hot where I am, I'm unable to go to bed and have been diverting myself with stuff to feed my brain for my weekend writing.

You know, I actually debated adding this song to the gallery page for Doppelgänger, but I honestly didn't start listening to this until the tail end of that book's creation. I didn't listen to any song at all for inspiration, and it was solely by accident that I ran across this one again after a long spell of forgetting it existed. 

Maybe it's sentimental of me to use it, but as it does have a lullaby-like quality, I imagine this melody being hummed by Marguerite when putting little Théodore to bed. 

I've also listened to the English versions of the song, but I don't know how faithful of a translation they are to the original French (the title might come close enough with the English being "Mockin' Bird Hill"). 

At any rate, it's a melancholy touch if I were to apply it to the book and the LaSalle family's backstory. I'm not adding it to the gallery page, though, but posting about it here is good enough. In the meantime, I'm also not listening to any songs for The Shadow Groom although one of the book's original prompts (besides being inspired by the Brothers Grimm fairy tale) was the Gothic album from Nox Arcana, which I listen to religiously alongside other albums from them. 

Hell, given the way my brain works, I might end up recycling ideas that Gothic gave rise to for a future book.   

Big Sale (Payhip), Baby Sale (Smashwords)

So I did a thing. 

But, firstly, a bigger thing, i.e., the big sale over at my Payhip site. When you purchase a copy of Doppelgänger, you can add another book from the Grotesqueries collection for free. This BOGO sale will be on through the end of March, and it's there to help promote my new release. 

So head on over there if you'd like to support me directly.  

Secondly, a baby sale -- this time I decided to hold a 50% off sale through the month of March over at Smashwords for two books specifically: Hell-Knights and The Flowers of St. Aloysius. 

I only plan to offer future BOGO sales of my books over at Payhip, by the way, because I'd like to draw more reader traffic toward that site. It's my personal store, and I have a lot more freedom when it comes to offering sales and other promos. 

As for Smashwords, I decided to try out their site-specific deals via Draft2Digital since D2D now owns Smashwords, and I can play with their coupon manager feature since I can't participate in their tri-annual site-wide blitz sales (the rules aren't flexible enough for me, I'm afraid). For this month, I'm offering the two novels listed above for my first round of sales. Depending on how well this ends up, I might be doing this on a monthly basis, but by and large, my Payhip store will be where the bigger deals are. 

And I'm going to make it a thing now that each new book released -- all of which will be for the Grotesqueries collection -- will mark a month-long BOGO sale linked to that book and the rest of the other long novellas under that heading. That will be the only time I'll be offering any of my 99 cent books at some kind of discount. The rest of the year will be a mix of 60 - 80% off or maybe a limited BOGO for the rest of my backlist.  

I already have two sales set up for April and May (one per month), and I just need to put one together for June before the next big sale for Grotesqueries, i.e., when The Shadow Groom releases on July 1.  

Now Available: 'Doppelgänger' (New Month, New Book, New Sale!)

Finally saw the back of February, and here we are! Seriously, for a short month, it always feels so, SO long, living out every minute of it. Good riddance. 

We are now staring a new month with a new book plus a book sale via my Payhip store. So behold, ladies and gents, Doppelgänger is now available for purchase online in e-book and print formats. Again, here's the blurb:

An impoverished young teacher loses his job when the informal ragged school where he works shuts down. A much-needed stroke of luck, however, brightens Alec Herridge's prospects when he stumbles across a frame-maker's shop and is offered a job. This puts him squarely in the path of an enigmatic and wealthy family from France—expatriates whom gossips whisper about. Something, they say, has followed mother and son to England, and day servants complain about a heaviness in the air whenever the family is at home. 

It's a dark energy that turns its attention to Alec now that his new job requires him to work closely with Marguerite and Théo LaSalle. It also appears to him as a silent lookalike of Théo, its presence marked by whispers in a child's voice. Urging, pleading, desperately reaching out to Alec for help. 

Folklore defines doppelgängers as heralds of ill fortune, but Alec soon discovers there's much more to Théo's double than a warning. That whatever horrible secrets the LaSalle family believes were left behind in France aren't the kind so easily explained away. That something has, indeed, followed them in exile and now refuses to be ignored or forgotten.

Go here for my Payhip store, which is the most direct way folks can support me. But if you prefer to go elsewhere, this is the Books2Read page for it. Links to the print book might take a day or two to update, so keep checking.  

Now here's an incentive for supporting me directly through Payhip (sneaky, sneaky me, I know)...

I talked about how I never put up the books in my Grotesqueries collection for special sales because they're already dirt cheap (many publishing gurus actually advise against doing this because this price point doesn't entice readers the way $2.99 does, but I have my reasons for sticking to things). Well, I changed my mind at least for my Payhip store.

I'm running a BOGO sale to promote my new book, and it involves the entire Grotesqueries collection. So if you buy a copy of Doppelgänger from my store, you can snag a free copy of ANY book from the same collection. The sale runs through the entire month, and it'll be the only sale for March. And, yes, it's only going to be at my store. 

So, yes -- if you purchase the book, I hope you enjoy it, and do leave a review to help it get some traction. Thanks for the support! Woohoo, new book! 

EDIT: If you tried to check out my store sometime yesterday (Feb. 28), you'd have seen the book already set up and available for purchase. Unfortunately, Payhip doesn't allow for pre-orders, so I might as well get that page live before I go to bed. So, hey -- that's one more incentive to buy direct! 😁

New Links and Other Fun Stuff

Okay, so Bookshop.org finally has my e-books listed in one handy page: over yonder, please, for the main page. Use the filter to get to the format of your choice. 

Again, these pages will take you to the online store fronts of small, indie bookstores, which I hope more and more people will support. 

I've hit my stride with The Shadow Groom and am back to the same mental place where I lost myself when I was working on The Twilight Lover, but rather than turn to Blackadder for my inspiration this time around, we're looking at -- of all things -- KPop Demon Hunters (a Netflix film). At its core, it has a real bonkers premise that's also bolstered by a crap ton of ridiculous moments, and I'm here for it. But it also does a terrific job exploring issues of shame and self-loathing without (from what I can see from scattered clips online, that is) undermining those issues with all the color and frenetic movement of a lot of scenes.

And the songs don't help (I mean that in a good way, of course). 

Ironically, I no longer have a Netflix subscription, but I might just re-up for a month if only to watch this movie as well as a couple more that's in their catalogue. I only know about this film through Youtube's algorithms because I've been watching reaction videos to Oscar nominated films, and YT decided to dump a bunch of reaction videos to different clips and songs from KPDH. 

I clicked on one. Then another. Then another. 

Now I can safely say I will be referencing this movie a lot in the future gallery page for The Shadow Groom. Why? Because I'm eating up all the absurdity and the color and the fun vibes of KPDH and using them for inspiration to keep my energy levels up as I power through the chapters. I'm currently hitting the 10K-word mark, and it's been such a fun ride so far. 

And if fans of the film and its soundtrack were to ask, I'm putting the two most subversive songs performed by the the antagonists at the top of my favorites. I mean, come on -- these are great villain songs, one couched in pure bubblegum pop packed with double entendres, the other pretty much being all out on sucking up people's souls. 

I mean...

Damn, "Soda Pop" is so catchy though "Your Idol" is No. 1 with its creepy visuals and its haunting melody (or haunting EVERYTHING about it -- just *chef's kiss*). At any rate, I'm posting these two here so I can go back to them down the line when the time comes.

As an addendum, I'm going to be offering a sale in March, and by that I mean it's in tandem with the release of Doppelgänger, so do watch this space. 

D2D and Bookshop.Org (Yay, Expansion!) -- Also a Writing Update

The most recent news in indie publishing involves Draft2Digital partnering with Bookshop.org for distribution of indie e-books via independent bookstores. 

😄

That means readers can now buy books by self-published writers (who use Draft2Digital) from small, independent bookstores -- not only in print formats, but in digital as well. My print books, for instance, are already listed on Bookshop.org, and I made sure to use that link for my main print store on my navigation menu here and at my Payhip store. 

And now I happily submitted all 49 books on my backlist to Bookshop .org for their digital storefront. And this means readers don't have to go to the bigger and more corporate stores like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Walmart, etc., for their books in either format.

If I were to limit my reach, I'd delist my books from the big stores and stick to this one, Smashwords, and my Payhip store. Libraries are also a no-brainer. This is something to think about down the line if I want to do some major spring cleaning, especially if my sales channels tend to number less than five despite the ever-widening distribution Draft2Digital is determined to go for (and kudos to them for being aggressive about it).

In writing news, I've already detached myself from Doppelgänger and have begun putting together the character and place list for The Shadow Groom. I already have the first chapter mapped out in my head (and my notebook), and I'll be diving into that tomorrow. Normally I'd be worried about pacing myself, but with my new work schedule, I can breathe more easily, and it'll be no problem catching up on the brief lag with my occasional extra days off. 

The book will be like The Twilight Lover in tone and setting in that it'll be a romantic comedy set in a fairy tale-ish place. I'm also leaning pretty heavily on trope reversals so that the more traditional family unit is bizarre and wild while the more eclectic family unit is more prim and conservative. So we're going to be back to having fun with family dynamics and how they influence our lovebirds. 

So yeah -- first step done, tomorrow will be devoted to the first chapter and Errol's family.  

 

'Doppelgänger' Gallery Page Now Up

Just a quick post here, ladies and gents -- the gallery page for Doppelgänger is now live. However, there are no links to the bookstores yet because the book might be uploaded for preview and pre-order purposes, but the final version is still being worked on. 

So head on down to this page for some tidbits on the book.  

'Doppelgänger' Blurb

Oooh, man, I'm so excited about this book. Now granted it started out completely different, but that version of the book hit a brick wall, and I just had to set it aside and start from square one. And let me tell you all, it was the right decision to make.

And as I continue to work on edits now (revisions are done), I guess it's time to share the book blurb:

An impoverished young teacher loses his job when the informal ragged school where he works shuts down. A much-needed stroke of luck, however, brightens Alec Herridge’s prospects when he stumbles across a frame-maker’s shop and is offered a job. This puts him squarely in the path of an enigmatic and wealthy family from France—expatriates whom gossips whisper about. Something, they say, has followed mother and son to England, and day servants complain about a heaviness in the air whenever the family is at home. 

It’s a dark energy that turns its attention to Alec now that his new job requires him to work closely with Marguerite and Théo LaSalle. It also appears to him as a silent lookalike of Théo, its presence marked by whispers in a child’s voice. Urging, pleading, desperately reaching out to Alec for help.

Folklore defines doppelgängers as heralds of ill fortune, but Alec soon discovers there’s much more to Théo’s double than a warning. That whatever horrible secrets the LaSalle family believes were left behind in France aren’t the kind so easily explained away. That something has, indeed, followed them in exile and now refuses to be ignored or forgotten.

I was originally planning to have it out in April or May when I still had the six-month calendar to work with. But with my day job schedule changing (and it starts this week), I find I'll have just the perfect amount of wiggle room to continue with the more challenging 4-month release dates.

This book's release will now be on March 1 -- not a lot of time left, but that's because of the problems I had that required me to start over. Plus I did take nearly a full month's break as well during the holidays to rest the brain cells. So it's going to be a tight final stretch, but I can do it. My energy levels and motivation are very high this month, and it's going to work out. 

And, you know, this turned out to be a book that ended up being very close to my heart. I've also said this about some of the books on my backlist before, but while I'm proud of everything I've written and published, this is one of the select few that really, truly felt good working on because everything in it means something to me.

Anyway, there's the blurb, and I'll be posting more updates on the book as we get closer to the release date.