Category Archives: Uncategorized

What a contrast from last week. Yes, three inches of snow last week. Bare ground and crocus blooming this week. Life in the mountains. However, I think we’re on the upside of spring these days.

Sigh. This was one time where, yet again, I don’t really want to write this accountability post. I’m in one of those periodic down phases of production and sales. No one is checking out the books, my promotional energy is fading, and I’m really struggling with the whole thing. Another week where I have the perception that nothing happened.

And yet, it did. I experimented with the new-to-me creation of videos in Book Brush and made a couple for Broken Angel‘s book birthday. I don’t know that they’ve had much of an impact, and yet…baby steps, baby steps, I need to keep telling myself.

I made some progress on writing Federation Cowboy, and have an outline for completion. It’s going to be around 60k words, which is probably about right for the sort of book it is.

I started exploring further options for online discussion and promotion, especially since Twitter is now being a pain about Substack posts (this one will probably get throttled, but we shall see). I also took a social media class given by Allison K. Williams through Jane Friedman. That class requires a bit of digestion and consolidation of notes, along with a specific action plan because there were some excellent suggestions that were helpful. I. Just. Have. To. Do. It.

One of the grim things I’m considering is activity tracking for a few days. Just note everything and figure out what I’m doing when and where. Part of this is about energy management. I suspect I’m doing better than I think, but part of all this is finding balance.

And maybe, just maybe, I need to consider readjusting my goals. I’ve already put aside the dream of making it big. It hurts to admit that, but I am most likely always going to be an obscure writer with a handful of readers. I can’t go to in-person gatherings, and it’s becoming obvious that this is a necessity these days. Oh, I interact with people on social media, but that isn’t everything and you can only tell the same group of people so much about what you’re doing. I’ve paid for some advertising and promotion, but am reluctant to do the big social media expenditures because if I don’t see results from smaller $$, then what will I see from bigger $$$? I don’t have the $$ to pay for hiring someone to do it, and frankly, that aspect of promotion is far too daunting for me.

Obviously, while the above paragraph reflects reality, I still have a tiny wisp of that dream. I get just enough feedback to suggest that it might happen, or it’s close…but it has been close for so many years that it’s kind of ridiculous to consider.

Ah well. Time to get back to writing work instead of agonizing.

This was the view this morning. About three inches here. It melted away during most of the day, but now it’s snowing again. However, we’re supposed to have temps in the 60s next Sunday. Will that happen? We shall see….

Another week where I’m wrestling with the very concept of doing this accountability work. Today was a big day and a first–the first quarterly assessment since I’ve started this tracking system. That meant I looked at my planned production schedule and–flinched. Yes, I’m running behind. Not just for the month but for the year. A big chunk of that, however, was figuring out promotion this month and trying to find a balance between promotion, authentic interactions on social media, and writing time. And horse time, and house time, and sewing time as well!

But I got things done this past month. The updated versions of the Martiniere books are now all up, and all I need to do is tweak the back matter once in a while. At this point, I’m focusing on getting the Netwalk books up–and I absolutely cringed when I looked at my Bowker ISBN listings. Netwalk has something like seven different ISBN versions, all for ebooks, none for paperback. SIGH. Yes, this reflects what was considered to be the thing to do during the early days of self-publishing. You got an ISBN for Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble/Kobo because they all had different variants of epub. I eventually dropped getting ISBN for the proprietary Amazon ebooks, then moved to just using distributor ISBNs. Still, I wish I could have had those numbers for the upcoming paperbacks. Oh well. Another batch purchased from Bowker in my future. I’ve learned my lesson.

Daylight Saving Time also really screwed me up as far as productivity is concerned. However, one thing that is working is using my alarm to get up at eight. Yeah, yeah, that’s the easy life of a retiree, except that if I don’t watch it, I end up sleeping in more and more, and I don’t get as much done.

I am also backing off from trying to market short stories except as a part of a collection. I looked at the rejects I have right now, and decided it was time to hold them for a collection. I realized that I might be able to put together a Weird West collection with my Oregon Country short stories. Two are published; one isn’t, and since all three are on the longish side, they can possibly make a nice little grouping. I need to go back through and look at some of my other work as well. If one story comes back, then it would be a good part of a fabulist collection. I could pull out the longer version of that story and combine it with two, perhaps three others for another collection.

The rest? I may need to look at what’s SF and what’s not, and group them appropriately. I might actually have enough for two separate collections, so…four short story collections, potentially?

Wow. Plus the Tales of the Raven Alliance. One story is out on submission and I may just pull it when it comes back, and use that one for the foundation for a Kindle Vella set of stories before I publish it as a collection.

(And now I need to set up a spreadsheet collecting those stories…eiyiyi).

The Cost of Power is now at around 60k words, and might turn into another Martiniere short series. Or not. I wrote about half of those words in the past two weeks, in part because I had visualized the story to that point. Now I need to turn that energy to Federation Cowboy. I want to get both of those books finished so I can move onto the Goddess’s Vision series–oh, and once I finish rereleasing the Netwalk books in paperback, the Goddess’s Honor series–incorporating the connected short stories in some cases–will be the next to be reissued.

Plus I made two book bags, one for donation, the other for my projected online store where I’ll be selling my small quilting projects along with my books. That’s a long term goal. I also made spring decorations and summer decorations–just need to do fall, and then I’ll start making SFFnal versions for…online sales.

Busy times ahead.

Planning promotion; picture by author

I felt like I was making some headway this week when, truthfully, the most work went into The Cost of Power. I’m now at the halfway point in the book and am pleased at the way the hinge point neatly manifested itself. It wasn’t what I originally had in mind, but all the same, I liked what the results were. However, poor Federation Cowboy hasn’t had any work done on it. Neither have the Goddess’s Vision outline nor the Raven Alliance potential Vella serial. All the same, 14,000 words for the week (not counting today) is getting back to the pace that I should be writing. More on that later.

However, I suspect that once I sit down with the Federation Cowboy notes and put the pieces together, it will take off. I needed the processing break in order to work through some issues because, again, it’s hit a hinge point and stuff is gonna happen fast. I had to do that with Power, which was also at a hinge point. We won’t talk about the potential scenes that I–sigh–will most likely NOT be writing for Power. Then again, they might make nice little outtakes. I’ll consider that.

Another thing that just didn’t happen this week was any sort of significant promotional activity, and it shows in my sales. That said, I also think it’s a good idea to take a week or so off every now and then, to avoid promotional fatigue. I’ll be working on new promotions this week and may start doing some of those more aggressively.

I’ve started seeing results from setting my alarm to get up at the same time every day. I may push it back another hour because I just plain start getting fatigued by the end of the day, no matter what time I get up. It’s mental fatigue as much as it has been physical. Interestingly, I’ve had a couple of nights where thoughts about Power meant I was writing late into the night. Most of the time, I’m also getting words down in the morning, which is quite helpful.

Non-writing stuff is also making progress. I crafted two tote bags–at least one for a donation as a door prize, along with some books. Then I made a couple of decorative spring runners for us–they’re very pretty. Almost marketable, but I made these for us. I also have plans to make similar ones for summer and fall–this started with making them for Christmas/winter, and then I decided, why not make more and incorporate them into my regular seasonal decor? I think I’m also going to start making some for fall/winter online sales/swag/stuff like that.

Along the same lines, I celebrated the equinox by putting away the winter decor and bringing out the spring stuff. Haven’t done the same switch with clothing yet because…we’re still getting snow and cold. Old mare decided that it was blanket time. She’s a lot happier with life now. She does well for the most part in winter without being blanketed, but the last few springs, once she starts shedding out, she seems to be uncomfortable. Well, old mare, damp and cold instead of dry and cold, so it’s understandable.

Overall, then, a decent week of things accomplished. I have to remember that I’m now sixty-five, so…need to plan and channel my energy effectively. To that end, I bowed out of participating in an anthology series. I didn’t get a lot of positive reviews in comparison to the other stories in the first volume, and while I had a story ready to put in the second one, it wasn’t the best of fits.

Onward.

time icons over vintage background vector illustration

Whoa. I have never, ever been able to quantify the degree to which the time change from Standard to Daylight has thrown me off schedule like this. Oh, I knew it was a factor, but I didn’t totally understand the degree of impact until now. Some of this is also due to the change in daylight since we’re at the equinox–and, once again, I hadn’t quantified it until this year. Probably because until the last eight years, daylight hours hadn’t been a significant factor in horse time. I had access to an indoor arena with lights, so…the big change was being able to ride outside. Now I need to readjust my horse time–back in October I had started moving it toward noon because of approaching limited daylight hours, and had somewhat figured out how to work around that issue. Now it’s time to start shifting back to late afternoon because by May/June, I’ll want to be riding later, when the sun is going down. That works better for both of us.

But the weather this winter has also been a huge factor in keeping me unsettled. After all, I somewhat expect to have real winter in the mountains of NE Oregon. That’s a given. But we have remained cold and snowy a bit later than usual, and that also throws me off balance a little bit. Right now I’m out there looking for any sign of life from my bulbs, and there’s just not much. Too much snow and frozen ground–but I think it’s turning around pretty quickly.

I tell myself that nope, didn’t get much done this week. And yet…I look to see that I got two books up on Ingram (both republications). I started the process (with a new list) of transferring my newsletter from TinyLetter to Substack. I’ll be running the two newsletters in parallel for a while before I do the final move. We’ll see. I wrote and uploaded a new chapter of Federation Cowboy, bringing that book to around 38k words, and began work on blocking out the rest of the book for pacing’s sake. I’ve added some words to The Cost of Power, which has intensified the degree to which that story will deal with mind control programming.

Stuff is getting done. Just not as much as I wanted to have done by now, especially with Federation Cowboy. That book is a struggle, because I’m realizing that the amount of work that needs to go into worldbuilding in far future settings rivals that of a fantasy setting. Especially since this is a first book in what might end up being an occasional series, it’s a world where there are a lot of nonhuman sentient species and I’m trying to reflect the different ways they do things including speech, social patterns, and the nature of sentience itself. It’s a more complex world than I expected it to be.

All the same, even in spite of the assorted reasons, there’s another, huge factor. I find that I’m needing to do the work later in the day. Staying up later. My body still wants to be on Standard Time, and while that kinda works, I still do enough stuff where I rely on clock time that I need to shift my circadian rhythms to–ugh–Daylight Time. Doing writing work later in the day is not going to necessarily be a good idea in the long run, though we shall see. And I need to be able to do more active stuff in the morning as well.

Sigh.

Plus I need to get back to working out. I’ve been a bit too sloth-like the last couple of weeks.

So this is apparently the Week of the Wakeup Call. Let’s see if it really works.

I’m now getting to the dangerous stage of any organizational process change. I recognize the phenomenon–a certain impatience, the thought that oh I really don’t need to do this anymore, I have the routine down, maybe it’s sufficiently internalized that I don’t need to go through this step when it comes to thinking about the executive meeting with myself every Sunday. Which always ends up becoming a big mistake, because then I am overconfident about the degree to which I’ve made these routines into habits and…yeah. Everything starts to slide, including productive patterns that haven’t quite made that final jump into habit. I overlook the reality that this past week was not as productive as previous weeks for various reasons, including body stuff, and that if I look back at what I have done this year already because of the new approach to organizing myself, these new methods work.

Yeah, this is a known failure point, not just for myself but for others who struggle with changing their processes. The 90-ish day of the method. When I was working with horses that were at the barn for rehab training, this was the period when old behaviors would start to crop up again, as a means of boundary testing. Same held true for students.

So this is why reflecting back (for humans) to see what has been able to happen is a good thing. I wish I had stressed that aspect more with my students. With the horses, it just meant a patient revisiting of early concepts and a restatement that the new rules are still in effect, no going back to the old ways.

And now I’m making myself push past this mark. I still need these organizational structures and probably will, in order to be an active and producing writer. There are no shortcuts.

What fell by the wayside this week was a lot of original drafting work. Oh, I did some edits on Federation Cowboy and got some new words down. But not every day, and not necessarily a lot of words. Cowboy appears to be one of those slow-moving works on the writing side of things, where I have to think about the process and the story. I think it is going to be a shorter novel, probably around 60k words, much like Beating the Apocalypse is. Which–would account for the slowness of the drafting. The shorter the work, sometimes the longer it takes to write. I’m packing a lot into this book and it shows, the more I work on it.

Other things. The dragon short story was the most popular of the freebies in the latest Smashwords sale. That makes me think that perhaps I should focus some energy into that particular world. I already have two of the stories written–Teacher-of-Dragons and Restoring Hope (currently out on submission under a different title). I can’t take it to Vella for drafting because Teacher has already been published, but perhaps I could turn it into an omnibus of sorts with Restoring and several other stories set in the world of the Raven Alliance. It might make more sense than pushing on with the Vortex books, which have their own issues. Hmm. The story might make a nice short book. Tales of the Raven and Dragon Alliance.

I seem to have finally settled into the new cover for Justine Fixes Everything. I didn’t like the previous image I had selected for assorted reasons, but this one evokes the mood of the book significantly better. Thematically, it hearkens back to the Netwalk books, which–Justine is heavy on the digital thought clones, which are a variant of the digital personality uploads in the Netwalk books.

I got the new version of Realization (light copy-edited interior, new cover) uploaded to Ingram and anticipate being able to approve it in a few days. Working now on the interior of Justine and plan to rerelease this week with the new cover, in hopes that it is a better match for the other People of the Martiniere Legacy books. Justine is the last of the revised Martiniere covers to be issued. Then it’s working on the paperback versions of the 2022 Netwalk books. Once I’m done with Netwalk, then I plan to redo the Goddess’s Honor covers and interiors. The interiors are…well, they were all done in Scrivener and there are issues. Fix those up while working on the new series set in that world, which is still being stubborn about telling me what it’s about. The Raven Alliance book may be the new distraction, or it may not be. We shall see.

So, for a change, let’s have a touch of spring in the office picture photo! This one is from the spring of 2020, when I discovered that–alas–my lovely lilacs were prone to having ants on them, which became a challenge for bringing them indoors to admire. Sigh. But that was a lovely year for lilacs…and you can see some of the writing books on my office shelf. One of my office bookshelves, anyway.

This ended up being a fairly busy and productive week. For once, a lot of stuff got crossed off on the to-do list. I was thrilled to see it, but…sigh. Most of the stuff that got accomplished had nothing to do with drafting, and everything to do with production, promotion, and community service work. No craft work got done; and the most writing was finishing off and uploading a chapter to the Kindle Vella project. I need to pick up the pace on the drafting side of things. On the other hand, this week’s chapter was one of the difficult ones, because my characters decided that they wanted to be romantically involved. That provides a challenge because while they are formally married, the contract they signed requires them to negotiate intimate relationships, including whether they decide to reproduce or not. No, this is not near-future. This is far-future, in a somewhat puritanical world view where marital associations include contractual agreements between persons (sometimes of different species) who want the legal structures and protections of a marital agreement without the reproductive or intimate aspects. Everything is contractual in the Federation of Sentient Worlds. Doesn’t mean there isn’t room for love and intimacy, just that those get negotiated for the protection of all parties involved. That’s one reason why Federation Cowboy is taking me longer to draft than I expected.

I’m also circling back to some breadcrumbs I dropped in earlier chapters which are actually somewhat relevant to the story. This book is becoming more complex than I first thought it would be. Which is a good thing, really.

Additionally, all the discussions about A.I. this week had me going over to some psychometric resources I know about (psychometrics is the study and creation of cognitive measurement) to see what that group of experts had to say. It’s somewhat more nuanced and more precise than a number of the popular journals are saying, and I have much more confidence in psychometricians than I do in tech folks who don’t necessarily understand the gritty details of cognition. Digging into those journal articles was a heavy slog, however, and made me realize that while I had to think a lot about it, I still possess a better understanding of what they’re talking about than people who haven’t worked adjacent to psychologists engaged in this study. I’m contemplating printing the articles out so that I can highlight, underline, and otherwise process the information in a form that works better for me (I simply don’t do well with deep reading on electronics. Part of it is the need to refer back, which is more difficult, and the note-taking process is more challenging electronically. Just the way I process). I suspect that I might have material for a blog, at least, if not an article, and there may be material for more than one article or blog in this rabbit hole. So I plan to allocate some time to this work in the next week, just to see what the possibilities are.

I discovered that the books I have up on Ingram are also available through Bookshop, so I spent this week putting those pieces together. I now have a shop on Bookshop, where I’m coordinating my series books and getting them together.

This being the first week of the month, too, I had a bunch of first-of-the-month things to pull together. Appointments, Zoom hosting, and more.

And, on a personal note, I seem to be spending a LOT of time lately updating my underthings. Well, it has been a few years, and some things wear out. Hopefully that ends reasonably soon. Still haven’t bought the new office chair because every time I look, they’re either not suitable or else the reviews are horrific (I always always always look at the one star reviews first). I want a chair that either doesn’t have arms or has arms that can be put up. That works best for me ergonomically. The absolute best chair–a rather expensive one, that I tried out at my son’s and would absolutely work size-wise, has ARMS. That while can be moved, still have a section that comes attached to the bottom, and will force my mousing hand into a position which it won’t like. SIGH.

Ah well. At least I seem to be getting stuff done. And promotion keeps happening.

Onward!

The accountability posts march right along. Since this is the last Sunday of the month, it’s the day to sit down and look at how well I did for the month.

The results were–surprising. The graphic above doesn’t go into a lot of details, but the main point? The process of planning, reviewing, and contemplating the goals I had set for myself, and taking a hard look at what has kept me from accomplishing some of those goals seems to be paying off. In the January summary meeting, I could only identify four things that really got done that month. February, though a shorter month, had eight things that got completed.

Now, granted, the to-do list is shorter as well in January. However, the February list also benefited from further clarity in some areas; most specifically getting a workable, organized promotion process set up by creating a number of spreadsheets (well, all right, THREE spreadsheets) to help me keep track of various aspects of promotion and marketing. One tracks online interviews and reviews; another events (both sales and appearances), and a third is…oh, I don’t know, I’d have to look it up but it’s there (correction: I do know and it’s sitting on my side desk. It’s the monthly promotion plan, broken down by week, and it’s printed out and tucked into my planner so that I can look at it, create graphics as needed, and check off to-dos).

One thing that has thrown me for a small loop is the whole AI kerfuffle. I have eleven short stories that I’ve had out on submission. At the moment, possible markets are either closed or else limiting submissions to once every three weeks after a rejection or acceptance. This somewhat causes problems with sending stories out to the top markets first, which is supposed to be best practice for submission protocols. It slows everything down, and…at this point, I’m having to change my regular submission day from once a week to once, maybe twice a month. And that is still problematic because rejections somewhat trickle in, bit-by-bit, and they don’t necessarily fit MY schedule. One of the challenges in managing ADHD is being able to set things up in an organized fashion so that I am not extremely dependent upon a faulty executive functioning process (I had an entire tracking protocol set up for case management when I worked in special education) to remember when stuff is supposed to happen. So–push submissions days out to every two months? Only once a month? Set up yet ANOTHER spreadsheet (or connected sheet) to track WHEN I can send a story out to the next market? ARRRGH.

I haven’t figured it out yet. I’m still struggling with how to make that work. Meanwhile, I’m just letting rejections flow back in. I created a folder in my email program which is labeled “Unprocessed Rejections” and am leaving it at that, until I figure out what to do next. Do I want to keep sending stories out, against a rising tide of AI competition? Wait and see what happens as magazines develop protocols to manage this new twist, just like they did when electronic submissions became dominant? While I’m becoming known (hopefully in a positive manner), I’m not sufficiently well-known that my name alone will get my foot in the door. Which means–still in the slush pile.

One possibility is that I use those short stories as Patreon rewards. Between those short stories and my previously printed stories, I probably have enough to last me for a while. Would I have enough subscribers to make a Patreon worthwhile? I don’t know. I’m not encouraged by my Substack subscriptions, and those are freebies. At the moment, I’m still sticking to the goal of writing one short story a month. Right now, they’re going to be reader magnets and worldbuilding tie-ins for my Goddess’s Vision series. Which is still in development (sigh).

Why do I have this mental image of moving huge piles of laundry when I think about this? Because that’s what a lot of what I am doing right now feels like. I have a lot of one-time organizing tasks to get done that, once I get them set up, will hopefully sustain themselves. But oh dear God, it’s processing to get to that sustaining mode that is such the heavy load.

Nonetheless, things are working. I’m making regular book sales. Nothing huge, but enough to be encouraging. I’m making my way through a backlog of things that got shoved off when the cataract started acting up a year ago.

I have decided that I’m going to work on adding a 100% Human Produced branding to my work. I’ll write more about this later, but my suspicion is that 100% human produced creative writing is going to become like handmade craft work. Perhaps I’ll add in my handmade craft work as well–and oh do I want to get back to having time to sew and design craft work as well as write. It’s just finding the damn time!

I’m using the new MacBookAir more. Right now, it’s where I’m doing the formatting for reissued work in Vellum. I can sit in my recliner in the evenings and get some done.

Plus–this is only the second month that I’ve been doing this. I know from my teaching days that oh yes, I am so capable of putting together an organized plan. I have created scope and sequence lesson plans for entire years. But…sustaining that organizational work frequently fell by the wayside (well, I was training a horse, working special ed, managing some home stuff, and writing…lots of stuff on the plate and lots more chaos than my current life).

Will I be able to keep this up?

I hope to do so. But we shall see.

Well, darn it, I can’t get the new version of Life in the Shadows to load correctly into Bookshop!

(If you see a version of it there with a different cover, it’s the old version and no longer valid)

Oh well.

In any case, I Have An Announcement. All of the Martiniere books are now connected to Bookshop, so if you want to pick up a paperback copy of those books instead of the ebook version, it’s now available if you don’t want to go through the Big River. I’ve also organized the books by separate series, so they’re easier to find.

As I finish loading the Netwalk Sequence books into Ingram Spark, I’ll be adding them to the Bookshop listing.

Bookshop link.

And if you want to get Life in the Shadows in paperback, it’s available on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Soon as I get the Bookshop list fixed, I’ll be adding that link. But don’t forget, it’s on sale for $2.99 at all ebook vendors.

At some point I want to talk about some insights I gained about the mother-daughter relationship by reading Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Blood of My Blood. It has some interesting perspectives on a parent who dedicates her whole life to ensuring her daughter has a better life than she does…only for said daughter to rebel and not marry as well as the mother had hoped.

But that’s a big undercurrent of the entire Netwalk Sequence–the relationship between mothers and daughters, and how even the best intentions can skew awry. Especially when mothers and daughters are not just political but business competitors. While that sums up the relationship between Sarah and Diana (the breakdown of which we see happening in Shadows), to some extent we see it with Diana and Melanie as well. Melanie and Bess, however, start trying to break the pattern. Can they do that, while dealing with all of the curveballs that come along with digital personality uploads, the Gizmo, and the schemes of the family matriarch who has a bit of power remaining to her, even as a digital personality?

Writing these shifting allegiances was…interesting. I keep muttering that it’s a darn good thing that my stories so far haven’t shown a tendency to jump worlds. That could make for some interesting fanfic, however–what would happen when Sarah Stephens meets Philip Martiniere (and which version of Philip is also relevant, since The Cost of Power is starting to reveal some interesting possibilities when Philip is not a total villain)? I have a feeling Sarah would eat the villainous version of Philip alive, simply because he’s so similar in many ways to Francis Stewart, who betrayed her. Except that Francis is more playful and fun than Philip, even when he turns toxic. Villain Philip is toxic, entitled, lacks a sense of humor, and would dearly love to be Emperor of the world. Sarah would just laugh in his face while dethroning him, either if they were both alive or in their forms as digital personality upload and digital thought clone.

Ruby wouldn’t face any romantic competition from Diana, Melanie, or Bess because Gabe is completely enthralled by Ruby. And despite their similar ranch origins, I don’t think Diana and Ruby would have a lot to say to each other. Nor Melanie, nor Bess. Ruby would be at best a colleague and business competitor, not a collaborator. She might collaborate with Sarah, but Sarah’s dark side would be a significant deterrent because Ruby is straightfoward and doesn’t care to play the manipulative games that Sarah enjoys. That would be the drawback for Ruby with any of the Netwalk Sequence women. Sarah, Diana, Melanie, and Bess are more manipulative than Ruby, and Ruby wouldn’t have much time for that.

Justine, however…she would probably have a good chat with Sarah. If those two started scheming, watch out! That said, as characters, both Justine and Sarah exhibit a tendency to keep their cards close to their chest and not communicate to me. I think I’d classify them as my Trickster characters. Both exhibit the ability to come out on top and overcome any setbacks that get thrown at them. I could see those two working together toward a common goal that benefits a lot of people, while advancing themselves.

Ah, the possibilities. Not that I intend to write them any time soon, just because I have other things to do. But Philip meeting Sarah, or Justine meeting Sarah?

Hmm. Hmm.

One of the things I’ve decided to do is slowly but surely get my entire catalog up and available in paperback through Ingram Spark and its extended distribution through bookstores. Oddly enough, when I started to try to make a cover for it so I could do the simultaneous release of ebook and paperback versions of the new edition, I could not make this cover work. No matter what I did, it just refused to come together. Was it lack of experience using Book Brush or my cataract messing with my vision so that I couldn’t focus properly? Hard to say. This cover happened very quickly, and without the problems of the previous attempt.

Nonetheless, given the winter weather sweeping across the country, this seems like a really good time to be focusing on this book and this series. Shadows opens with a confrontation between mother and daughter, after daughter has returned from sneaking off to go skiing with her forbidden love. Which gets even more into corporate politics, because in the world of the Netwalk Sequence, corporations have gained a lot more overt political power. We somewhat see the evolution of the Corporate Courts (though that was never the intent of these stories) as a means to control a mysterious device. Shadows details the progression of the growing estrangement between Sarah Stephens and her daughter Diana Landreth, set against the politics and the technology they’re both working with. While this is a story collection, it has a definite through line of telling that story, and…many of the stories within Shadows, including “Winter Shadows,” “Shadow Harvest,” and “Cold Dish” explicitly take place in winter settings. Though for the skiing piece, you have to wait for the next two books in the series to have any significant ski scenes!

Honestly, most of this book was drafted when I still taught at Welches, up on Mt. Hood, and was skiing at Timberline. In many ways, I still miss those days. I’ve toyed with the notion of pulling together my old ski blogs from LiveJournal and putting them up as a Ski Days book. So far, however, I’ve just not had the time nor the energy to put it together. Will I? Maybe.

However, those ski days on Hood still resonate within me. I really got into the culture up there on Hood, and the Netwalk books reflect that experience as much as they do the corporate soap opera, the mother-daughter dynamics across four generations, the implications of digital personality uploads, and my projections of the politics of the mid-to-late 21st century.

Life in the Shadows is on sale for $2.99 in ebook through March 31st as well as now being available in paperback. After March 31st, with (hopefully) the rest of the series available in paperback, the ebook price will go back up to $4.99.

I’ll probably spend some time over the next few weeks occasionally talking about this series. A retrospective, of sorts, perhaps pointing out some Easter Eggs in the story for those who know the area. There are some interesting pieces about it.

Here’s where you can find Shadows. Note that both Amazon and Barnes and Noble now link to the paperback:

Amazon Apple Barnes and Noble Kobo Smashwords.

I’m not sure what’s happening with this book, but I’m suddenly selling copies like mad on Ingram. Could it be promotional help due to an excellent interview with Deborah Ross? Possibly. I have another excellent interview with J. Scott Coatsworth that released today, so we’ll see. Now I’m just hoping I don’t get hit with massive returns!

I bit the bullet and did my writing income books for 2022 and started for 2023. My Draft2Digital income dropped significantly, but it wasn’t until I was working on getting links for an interview that I figured out why. My usual sales source, Barnes and Noble, didn’t publish The Enduring Legacy until a few months after its release. Ouch. B&N, normally my best seller, fell significantly and hasn’t recovered. Thankfully, Apple and Smashwords seem to be filling in the blanks, along with a mild assist from Kobo. But my Ingram sales started picking up. That gives me an additional incentive to make sure that all of my books are eventually available in paperback form–and I need to fix my older books that were formatted in Scrivener. While I’ve done that for the Netwalk Sequence books, I need to do that next for the Goddess’s Honor series. Which is going to be–a job, especially since those books will probably need new covers due to adjustments in pagination. We shall see. It’s a big job, and I’m not sure I’m ready to get to that yet. I learned my lesson from doing the Netwalk books last year!

However, I managed to wrap up the worldbuilding short story for the new Goddess’s Vision series in development. I’ll probably send it off to the NIWA anthology because it somewhat matches the Harbinger theme for this year’s anthology. It will end up being a reader magnet for the Goddess’s Vision series no matter what–I’m trying to get into Heinmyets’s head because he is going to be a big part of that series.

I also got another chapter written for The Cost of Power, which takes that serial up to the end of June before I have to worry about running out of material. Not that I’m too worried, because I think that book will finish long before the serialization does. It gave me a nice breathing space for Federation Cowboy, which will be next week’s focus. I’d like to get a couple of chapters in with that book. My sense is that it’s going to turn out to be about 60K words, which means I’m about a third of the way through the whole book. But it could surprise me. We shall see. I still need to introduce the Memaj issue, and get everyone to the Federation Congress, where stuff really gets exciting. Not that it hasn’t been exciting at this point….

I finished revising the print interior for the first Netwalk Sequence book, Life in the Shadows. Hopefully, I can get the cover designed and the whole thing uploaded to Ingram today. Then I started work on the interior for the print version of Beating the Apocalypse and yikes…it’s pretty telling that this was about the time that my eyes started misbehaving. I have a mess to fix.

Today also needs to be taking a deep breath and diving into creating some sort of coherent, doable, promotion plan. I’ve been blocking out pieces of it already with my new spreadsheets–well, it’s time to start integrating them into planning.

I keep thinking about direct sales, but a reminder that sales tax is an issue made me step back and reconsider. I need a venue that handles the taxes because I am just not gonna dive into that mess on my own. SIGH. That may slow things down significantly.

Overall, then…a fairly productive week, with a bunch of stuff crossed off of the weekly to-do list. Hopefully I’ll get some other pieces crossed off today.

Onward.