Hello Out There

Being a self-published author is a weird position. When I initially drafted GGTR in 2021, it was mostly an exercise in seeing if I could do it--if I could write a full draft of a short novella, not having completed a manuscript in over a decade. I decided to self-publish it mostly so that my friends could read it, and also because I thought the process would be interesting and fun. And it was! I got to take in feedback, learn to format, hire my dear friend Abby Gavit as my cover designer, and relearn the ins and outs of KDP (which had changed a lot since the old CreateSpace days.)

To my surprise, GGTR did pretty well for the fantasy debut of someone who, until fairly recently, was mostly known for horror fanfiction. I have my long-time friends and their generous word of mouth to thank for that. And so I ran headlong into the next project, TM. I started trying to learn how to navigate author Twitter and the other author spaces online. And I came up short against a pretty big wall, which was myself.

If you've never tried to discuss your original fiction and your original characters in a formerly mostly-fandom space, you might not know the feeling I'm describing, but I know it plagues me and many of my writer and artist friends: the fear that you're being annoying, needy, self-absorbed in talking about your creative process. I have never managed to achieve the confidence that your average authortuber or authortokker has. Putting myself out there on Twitter can feel silly and self-important, which is only reinforced when there's little or no engagement. It's easy to be in a fandom, where everyone is speaking a shared language, but it's lonely to be a fiction writer, asking folks to care about the imaginary dolls you play with in your brain. I made and abandoned an Instagram. I made and deleted some TikTok videos. I made and deleted a Ko-fi shop. It's my anxiety, or past bad experiences, or frugality, or generally low self-confidence, or some combination of all of those things and more--but I have trouble speaking out loud or at length about my very personal, dearly-held creative work. I'm certain I'm not the only one.

I'm hopeful that a website, which can function as a place for more long-form thoughts, a repository of work, a central space, will help me be more confident. I can yap about the process and the frustrations and the wins without worrying too much about clogging up my friends' feeds (and, potentially, avoid the networking catastrophe that's imminent every time Elon Musk walks into Twitter headquarters with a half-baked idea that could crash the entire enterprise. I'm not calling it X. Shut up.) I was raised on LiveJournal, after all.

What I'm working on right now is...nothing! I've just started the first classes of my post-baccalaureate Zoology degree (!!) which is both exciting and extremely intimidating. I don't know how much time or energy I'll have to devote to writing in the coming months, but I am trying to keep my weekends free of schoolwork, so I may be able to find time there. TFYOS, one of the Culcannagh stories, is still in the brain-percolating stage, rumbling around in there like rocks in a tumbler. My Antarctic horror WIP has been bothering me for some attention lately, and it's probably overdue, given the project's been on indefinite hold since 2020. And there might be a third, even more out-of-left-field concept also simmering away, way at the back of my mind, though I doubt it will come to anything. I have short Culcannagh stories (mostly in-world folklore) that I want to write, and short codas to GGTR, and and and. Writing is never going to be my full-time job, and I don't want it to be, but what I wouldn't give for a mysterious, liminal 48 hours between Sunday and Monday, in which to do nothing but write.

Something cool I did recently was a local author fair at the Read Queen bookstore in Lafayette, CO! I sat next to Maria Mankin, a cozy mystery author, and sold out of every copy of my two novels that I'd brought with me. It was my first time publicly sharing my work with other people and it went so much better than I anticipated. I'm considering signing up for COSine, a SFF con in the Springs, since the local fair went so well.

Anyway, I hope that this is something I can maintain, and that it'll be interesting and useful to fellow indie authors and the folks who enjoy my work.

I'll leave off this first post with the requisite Kermit Picture. Thanks for stopping by!