One of the great things about being an independent author is that you get to make all the decisions. Feel like writing a fifteen-volume series about trans-dimensional robots searching for fresh strawberries on a lava planet? Go for it. Feel like capitalizing every third word in a sentence? I question the long-term strategy, but you be you. Feel like releasing your book on a certain day? There aren’t any publishers to tell you not to.
Grey snow in the air
and the wind that spins
around and up and through
skeletons of what was,
silhouettes that crumble
and disappear.
It took everything we had. It took grit and gumption and the unconstrained passage of time, but we finally did it. We made it to the new year! A year of optimism, baby yoda memes, 20/20 vision jokes, and, of course, goals and resolutions. Which means it is finally time to share my 2020 writing goals, in all their wildly-optimistic glory.
Dear 2019,
At the risk of repeating myself… you’ve been a year.
The older I get, the more individual years tend to blur together. As a child, every year felt different and new. As an adult, it often feels like one single strand of time, occasionally dotted with holidays and vacations.
The year is almost over, and 2020 is lurking somewhere in the clouds above us, waiting for the moment we should cast our eyes skyward to come crashing down upon us in all of its fury. But we’ll worry about 2020 some other time. Like… a week or so from now. As I did last…
And poof. Just like that, it’s December. Time has a way of speeding up around the holidays, and this year has been no exception. Between See These Bones’ book launch, a five day water fast, Thanksgiving, my birthday, and a trip to Florida for my mother’s birthday, you’d be right to wonder if I’d gotten…
So… a thing happened last week, and contrary to my fears, the world didn’t stop spinning. Nor did the barbarian hordes sweep down from the north to sack Rome for an eighth time. In Las Vegas, we did have a week of unseasonably warm weather for November, but something tells me that had nothing to…
After more than three years, dozens of query letters, countless cover-to-cover revisions and editing sessions, several months of cover shenanigans, a live-action trailer, and eight-plus posts of countdown hype, the release day of See These Bones is finally here! Today, readers from around the world will finally get to experience the post-Break world through the eyes and mind of my possibly doomed and very-much-broken protagonist, Damian Banach.
I’m equal parts happy, excited, and… worried.
We’d traveled through another few miles of dust and dirt, the temperature rising steadily with the sun, before I finally replied.
“I don’t know what you’ve heard about me, but all I do is see ghosts. Just one ghost, really. If you’re looking for armies, I’m not your Crow.”
“Not yet. With time and instruction… we will see.”
I flinched as the car dodged a house-sized tumbleweed. “Are you saying the government has some sort of secret training facility for people like me?”
There’s nothing to like about Bakersfield. Pretty sure that was true pre-Break, and it’s sure as hell true now. Balls-hot in the summer, foggy and moist in the winter, boring as shit year-round. The city’s a long way from the ocean, from L.A. or the Bay. It just sits in the middle of nowhere like a middle finger to the tumbleweeds.
No wonder Dad went nuts.
Not that it excuses what he did.