I’m taking a deep breath in 2025 and starting to do things with my writing work and planning that I probably should have been doing long before now.
First of all, I’m in the process of establishing a domain where it will be easier for me to manage all those fiddly little tweaks in email that need to happen for optimal newsletter processes. I’m going to be diving into fixing newsletter stuff I should have been doing a while ago, as well as looking for new subscriptions to my monthly publishing newsletter. Given the chaotic nature of current social media, I’m getting back to the concept of the mailing list.
(p.s., if you want to sign up for the list, here’s the link: https://joycespublishingnewsfromwideopenspaces.kit.com/a65eaa89cd )
Second, I’m going through my backlist and updating not just the back matter but performing a copy editing review. Most of the books that have gone through the Vellum formatting program have already undergone this process. However, especially for my science fiction, I’m in the process of reformatting some books because Vellum now has a text tool. The reformat has the greatest impact on my Netwalk Sequence series because I’m able to get around some clumsy formatting issues with regard to electronic communications. That’s a huge chunk of the Netwalk books and, for me at least, the result seems to provide better readability and faster pacing.
Third, as I go through this updating process, I’m going to be featuring selected books and series in blog/newsletter posts. I’ve outlined what I want to do with each set and this is an opportunity for readers to see the story-behind-the-story–where I found inspiration, discussions of what I was trying to do with each book, and even what I really liked about the particular work under scrutiny.
Hey, I wouldn’t be writing these stories if I didn’t like them.
I will be providing links connecting the related series/books on Substack…possibly here as well, though it can get complicated.
Don’t worry! I’ll still be writing about horses and other musings here as well as these organized book blogs. I promise not to drown you in book stuff. In fact, some of my loosely planned ideas include a musing on stretching and exercising in my life, some reflections as I reread Ursula K. Le Guin’s essays, and who-knows-what-else as the year goes by.
It’s just…well, I have these books I’ve made. I like these stories, or else I wouldn’t have written them. They deserve greater visibility than they’ve received over the years, so this is my attempt to maybe attract a bigger readership.
I also have plans for original writing–not just the threatened fantasy trilogy that I’ve been evading by writing a lot of other stuff, but a horse memoir focused on an equestrian era that I see fading these days. Might even scribble a short story or two.
Meanwhile, here’s the link for the first book in the series I’m featuring this month, The Netwalk Sequence. Life in the Shadows is a collection of short stories I wrote when trying to work through some character dynamics in the later books of the Sequence. It takes you through the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship of Sarah Stephens and Diana Landreth as they wrestle with the implications of the early emergence of a wireless communication implant technology originally intended to control bioremediation bots. Sarah is sucked more and more into a political world while Diana is a corporate tech leader–and while their goals sometimes align, when they don’t…the results can be problematic.
Life in the Shadows is on sale for $2.99 at all major ebook outlets throughout the month of January. Link includes Kindle.
https://books2read.com/lifeintheshadows
