Happy birthday to me! I’ve always thought it would be a good idea to start my blog on my birthday, but I’ve had a lot of ideas about blogging over the years that have ended up not being good. I suppose the reason for insisting that a blog start on my birthday, New Year’s Day, or Nowruz is thaumaturgic, as well as the question about how often I should post. Daily? Weekly? The ostensibly sensible answer, “whenever I want,” seems unrealistic. Sometimes I take thaumaturgy too seriously. The featured Wikipedia article for my birthday this year is The All-Story Magazine, the pulp magazine that helped Edgar Rice Burroughs blow up; that’s very thaumaturgic.
The purpose of this blog right now is to serve as a crackling campfire around my writing by which I can hang out and soothe myself. You can come too.
I write books. I have a day job but I am working on growing as an indie author. At this point in my journey, the most important thing that I do to do that is write the aforementioned books. I currently don’t do a lick of promotion and am only now starting the blog even though the back matter of all my stories has been linking to my blog! I started this endeavor in earnest a year and a half ago when I stumbled across a successful author named Dean Wesley Smith who offers a lot of thoughts and resources about becoming an indie author; these were actually helpful to me so here we are now.
DWS says that 20 major books (with good stories, good covers, and good blurbs) is an important milestone in order to achieve discoverability on vendors like Amazon. Early on, building a catalog of work (the word “backlog” works too but sounds too poopy for me) is important because the best advertising for one of your books is another one of your books. I’ve lost count of my major books because it’s bad for me to be too rigidly homework-oriented and because at least one of my works is an in-betweener, but it suffices to say that I’m about three-quarters of the way there. The progress has been, let us say, not completely futile. One of my aims with this blog is that my transparency about my creative process and workflow helps others with similar goals. I hope it helps by exemplifying what to do rather than warning what not to do, but we shall see. Oh, I just realized that this paragraph casually makes it sound like writing 15 books in a year and a half is no more of a shock than the sun coming up every day. If you felt I glossed over that detail, well, I will get into it more later.
Currently I write eclectic short story collections, often with recurring characters, as well as longer books of the fantasy persuasion. I’ll get into my creative background later but it might interest you to know that domains like comics, anime, and TTRPG’s are almost absent from my list of influences except what I can’t help but absorb through cultural osmosis. Right now I am working on a sequel to the aforementioned in-betweener; I would like to do a third one as well, then wrap them up in an old-school bundle that unambiguously qualifies as a major book. I also have an extremely introverted and feline temperament; I don’t “write to market” and I struggle to write about the same thing more than twice in a row.
I will also probably post opinions on things I have read, heard, or seen. That way if my children ever want to dive into a “dad rock repository,” they have a guide. And, of course, this blog is also my website in general, which means that if I keep up with it there should be pages for my books with information about what they are and where to get them.
That’s enough for now. I’ll see you again tomorrow.