Calendar (2023 and Beyond)

For this year, here's what you need to know:

these are the books and the finalized dates for their release

So!

I'm considering turning my four-month calendar (three books a year) to something more like a five-month schedule or even a six-month schedule if that doesn't pan out as well as I've hoped. With my focus now being strictly on long novellas of 50K words and working on them only on the weekends, I average around three months for a book to be written in its initial draft, which also includes light editing and revising that happen along the way and which helps me a lot when the actual revision / editing rounds finally happen.

The five-month calendar will yield two books one year and then three books the next and then back to two the year after that. The staggered annual calendar will be good, I think, and that'll give me extra time to ease up and take a break in between projects in the event I get a book done a lot sooner. Ye olde brain needs it. 

There'll still be the alternating book release, so when I follow the five-month schedule after The House of Ash, it'll look like this:

• March (2024) -- Ghosts and Tea novella
• August -- Grotesqueries novella
• January (2025) -- Ghosts and Tea novella
• June -- Grotesqueries novella
• November -- Ghosts and Tea novella

And so on and so forth. If I run out of story ideas for a collection, it'll be Ghosts and Tea considering how many books have been written already for that series plus all the stories take place in the same setting and use the same characters. As much as I love Prue, Freddy, and the gang, their stories are finite, but I'll make sure to mine every possibility their universe offers because they're just too much fun. Grotesqueries, on the other hand, will continue indefinitely since each novella is a standalone. Anyway, I'm just putting this out there for everyone's benefit -- as well as mine, I suppose.

And I Continue to Inch Forward

My humble site / blog is coming together really well. Slowly but surely, yep, but it's starting to feel more like home. I'm still making sure I get used to not expecting clicks, shares, or conversations, which was my conditioning at various social media sites through the years. Mastodon is doing a terrific job of helping me "heal", but Tumblr -- for all of its fun loopiness and amazing art -- is falling fast behind. Stats when it comes to the notes for each post remind me way too much of Twitter, and I've reported and blocked way too many accounts there that aren't even spam bots. 

Anyway, I made sure to add the blogs I follow over there to my reading list here on Blogger, so I don't fall behind on their updates, and I can still swing by and read their posts as a guest and not a user. In brief, I've decided to delete my Tumblr account at the end of this month. I'm only waiting for my recent posts there to show up on my Goodreads blog space to make sure they're still going through, so I can put up a final message, wait for it to show up on Goodreads, and then delete my account once and for all.

I've been tweaking this space for a bit now, and the pages are coming back up when I used to dislike creating them in the past. Folks will just have to be okay with text and links on my book list page instead of an image-heavy list with book covers and so on. I've got well over thirty books published so far, and that number's not going to stop anytime soon. I've also just tried setting up a static home page, and I was reminded of why I disliked doing something like that before. It's great in theory where I'm coming from, but actual practice isn't as encouraging. 

Maybe I'm just too fussy for my own good, but there it is. 

EDIT: My site's appearance has also undergone a few changes as I tested out various looks in hopes of making this place look a touch professional. But the problem is that I'm really big on old school looks like the relic that I am, but they're simple enough while lacking all the pretty and shiny. As long as people who visit my space don't run into problems navigating their way around, all's well. I guess that should be my motto: Relic and proud of it!

'Arcana Europa' Mega-Novel Sale

I'm having an e-book sale that'll run through all of March. My three mega-novels in the Arcana Europa collection are currently 50% off the e-book price at all online stores (libraries aren't a part of this).

So, yeah -- starting March 1, the following books will be half off:

GUARDIAN ANGEL (gay New Adult, gothic horror, gothic romance, historical fantasy, ghost story, app. 150,000 words) -- $2.49 (USD)

THE FLOWERS OF ST. ALOYSIUS (gay New Adult, gothic horror, gothic romance, historical fantasy, dark fantasy, app. 140,000 words) -- $2.49 (USD)

HELL-KNIGHTS (gay New Adult, gothic horror, gothic romance, historical fantasy, vampire fiction, app. 140,000 words) -- $2.49 (USD)

That'll be a great way of testing out the waters if people aren't sure of my usual stuff. And if you do purchase any of them, thanks so much for your support, and do spread the word!

Blue Savannah (2009 Remaster)

I swore to myself when I reactivated this blog that I'll use this personal space to celebrate things that make me happy. Erasure is one of those, and this song holds a very, very special place in my heart.

I listened to Erasure's music obsessively while writing my first ever self-published book way back in the late 1990s. It's no longer in print, and it was published under my real name. It was also not very good on the whole, but it was a valuable lesson for me who was trying to go about the self-publishing route without much of a guide. Everything was a fumble -- but a fun and exciting fumble. It was a bright, shiny, uncharted world, and everything good was possible. My love for storytelling was suddenly given legitimacy.

This song, in particular, is somehow tightly connected to the book and those heady early days of writing and publishing, especially the final chapters, because it was a feel-good gay romance that simply tied in with the song's romantic message. I love Erasure, I love this song in particular, and it never fails to make my heart hurt from so many good memories and associations even when I was flailing like crazy from start to finish.

To Print or Not to Print

I recently received a message from Draft2Digital regarding an increase in print book prices starting in March or maybe even April (can't even remember the date -- go me). That's going to be a real bummer as I've just set up all of my books for print through their print program (a partnership with Ingram), and the prices were pretty difficult to come up with since I tried my best to make them as affordable for readers as possible, which meant way less royalties for me. I'd hate to bump up the prices again, frankly, and if I don't see any other workaround, I'll have to delist my books. 

 

And what that means is that I'll either have to move back to Amazon's print program for that service, or I'll simply not offer any of my books in print format. It's always good to give readers options, but for someone like me (a terrific Tumblr post correctly called writers like me low-income writers), who's lucky to sell one print book a year, there's really no call for print books, which justifies the second option of simply delisting my books for print. Anyway, I thought I'd put this out there as a general warning to readers. My print books may vanish altogether, and that might not be a bad thing in the end.