Hey everyone!

2024 has been an interesting year so far. Yesterday was my birthday, and it was a great one. Went to Arcadia in McLean, IL and had a blast playing arcade games and pinball there. Then dinner with friends.

I also got some fantastic gifts, like the original He-man game for Intellivision, a handmade Sorceress stained glass piece of art, and a tent for camping!

It was also the one year anniversary of releasing The Master of Shearhaven. I took a step back from making video content becuase of the time involved versus the results I was getting. As fun as it is to make book videos for 100-ish people who watch them regularly, the fact was it was taking time away from my writing. The book videos are a ton of fun and I do enjoy them, but it was time to rethink where my energy was going.

I'm glad I did. It's been nice, to be honest, not feeling like I have a third job as a book reviewer. I've also slowed down my reading some. I haven't played a video game in forever, but I got back to Professsor Layton & The Diabolical Box on DS and finished it. I've also been playing Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora which has been fun to explore. The point being, I've had time for other things I enjoy, like good movies and TV and all the other things that make life more enjoyable.

Some of this is just about breaking myself out of the constant desire to PRODUCE. I've always had that spark of wanting to make stuff. If I'm not making something, then you should probably be worried for me. The times in the past when I'm not creating have been pretty dark times indeed. At the same time, I do recognize that sometimes this good impulse gets transmorgrified by some internal mechanism into a drive that is, I've come to find, counterproductive.

For instance, I am so excited to start getting Dharktyde Racers out to people that it had me kind of rushing for a while. Not rushing to finish, but just rushing the writing process thinking I needed to get it done quick. Thinking I needed to get something new out to promote. I think it's part of the danger of the cycle of churn and churn and churn that dominates social media. When, the truth is I have a whole book (The Master of Shearhaven) I should just be promoting again and again. It's one of the hard things about being both the artist and the promoter. Being excited about the thing you're working on while keeping the excitement going for the thing you've already released. But, I do think I need to give TMoS more love. It's a good book. It deserves to be read by more people. And I think that promotion will be more and more offline and in person, if I can figure out how to do that well.

Dharktyde Racers

I've been working away at Dharktyde Racers consistently. (There's a sneak peek at the sketch for novella 4 above!) I've been tackling novella 6, and as I suspected it's been pretty complex as the number of characters and plotlines that converge are pretty epic. Not to mention it has it's own story to tell! It's been slow going just to make sure I'm hitting the plot and character beats as well as I can the first draft. I know there's time to burnish and perfect in later drafts. But I do like to get the core of what I'm trying to do in the first go, even knowing it'll change more in the future. I haven't been unhappy with the progress, it's just been slower going than I expected.

That being said, the first novella won't be out until 2026. I still have to finish novella 6, and then there's three more planned novellas to write before the full "season" of Dharktyde Racers is done. I discussed it before, but I've decided to write all the novellas because I want to make sure I can go back and check everything for consistency. Not just plotwise, but character-wise too. Some characters have just grown and grown as I've written them. It's one of the magical things about writing. But it also means I need to make sure their character arcs make sense throughout.

The funny thing is, rather than be frustrated by this turn of events, I'm excited! Yeah, it'll be longer before I have something new to serve up. But what I'll be giving you will be better. I also want to explore having audiobooks up for each novella as they go up. All of which will take time. Meanwhile, I can work on promoting The Master of Shearhaven some more, and maybe get one of those other books I have in various stages of completion closer to being published too.

Site Memberships

Now, for some housekeeping. The lower tiers of memberships for this site have gone away. Everyone who is subscribed is subscribed at the top tier anyway (thank you all!) plus, this is readying things for the future. For now, the top tier is still called the Skeleton Key tier. That'll change in the future. Basically, the idea is that I'm going to have site memberships tied to the "Dharktyde Racers" subscription. People will be able to subscribe to the site, and get access to each story for a set price PLUS all the other stuff I'll be offering.

More Here!

The other thing, I've struggled to figure out what to put up here. What do people want to read? What will get them exctied, etc, and how does it fit in with a newsletter if I wanted to do that? My idea is to make this more of a blog as well as have the behind the scenes stuff and extra stories that I've posted here in the past. With the email function, this could be similar to a newsletter, too. We'll see. Still figuring that out, but you should see even more cool stuff here in the future.

Thanks once again for joining me on this journey. Your support means the world to me.