Layers. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers… You get it? We both have layers.
My first book was published on September 22, 2025, so I have been publishing for almost a year now. However, I have been writing properly for a little longer than that. I wish I could remember how I first stumbled across Dean Wesley Smith but I didn’t commit it to memory as it didn’t seem important at the time— I had probably just googled stuff about writer’s block, looking for stuff that could help a really bad case. I found DWS’s workshop Killing the Critical Voice and paid $300 for it. That was the beginning of February 2025. A week later I began to write my first novel, A Good Creature, and finished it in three weeks, working on it every day. Then I wrote another novel in from March to May which took longer. Then I thrashed and flailed trying to figure out my creative workflow and excise the horrible writer’s block tumors, so it still took a little while after the DWS workshop to get working on stuff. I basically started my creative life over. By September I realized I had written enough stories in 2025 to make a book, so I put them together and published Final First. It took a little longer to manifest the courage to look at my novels again, but I published those too and also found other stories.
I published 8 books in 2025: the novels A Good Creature, The Taboo of the Grand Antlers, and This Doom Shall Pass, and the short story collections Final First, Cicada Children, This Fist, Isolated Showers, and Liquid Lightning. DWS says that 20 major books is an important milestone for discoverability, so I set the very clean goal of writing 1 book per month in 2026 so I could reach 20 by 2027. I have since abandoned this rigid goal even though I am only slightly behind because the coming months are going to bring some big life changes whose importance will crowd out my luxurious life of sitting around like a sleepy lion and writing books at speed. The most crucial thing, as I will get into when I describe my writing philosophy in more detail, is to keep the act of writing itself fun and block out the externalities.
So far in 2026 I have published 7 books: the short novels The Water Jolts the Water and Gigantic Melancholies, and the short story collections Serene Grace, Lower Power, Wild State, Anti-Stories, and Extreme Speed. Currently I’m working on… maybe I shouldn’t say what I’m working on. Well, I’ll say it’s a longer thing, not short stories.