Chloe Garner's Blog, page 2

November 2023, and growing up

So there’s kind of a joke among authors, one that they don’t often call out in words, but that we all know, anyway, that if you ask your existing fans what you ought to write next, they are always and universally going to tell you: MORE.

They love the worlds they know.  That’s *why* they’re an existing fan.  It’s really not complicated or nefarious, and it’s one of the most affirming things I know, as an author.  They get to the end of a series – its current endpoint, at any rate – and they *want the next book*.

Yay!

I win.

Authorpoints.

The inherent tension with this is that authors want to try stuff.

Not universally.  I won’t speak for all of them.  Some of them build one thing, love it, love the fans they have of it, and they do *that thing* quite successfully as a career.

Kudos and huzzah.

But ME.  And a lot of the authors I hang out with.  We like to try lots of stuff.

Sometimes they don’t make a scene about it.  They pick up a new pen name, write some new stuff with that new pen name, and they never mention to you that they even did it.  They know that you’re a fan of *the thing that IS*, and they’ll come back and write more of that thing at the appointed time, whenever that is.  All is well.

Sometimes they try that new thing and they tell their fans, and their fans get really livid because *that’s not MY thing*, and the fans feel like the author has wasted his life energy putting something into the world that isn’t *MY thing*.  I’m sure I have some of this sort of fans, but broadly speaking, I don’t *have* fans like this.  I haven’t run into any of them.  My fans tell me what series they came in on and desperately want more of, then they wander off and read some other stuff and come back and admit that, while they still *love* that thing they came in on, they have a new favorite.

Authorpoints.

I love this.

My point is that I have spent… quite a long time, now, writing *different* stuff.  I write 4 books in a series to get the characters into a place where they do-a-thing-well, then I try to leave them in a reasonably happy place and I go write something else.  For years, I would tell people that I wrote science fiction, fantasy, urban fantasy, and paranormal, and people who *reaaaallllly* knew would say: but you don’t write any fantasy.  And technically, they were right.

I snickered quietly and thought: just you wait.

I started this pen name with urban fantasy/paranormal.  I played there for quite a while.  I wrote science fiction.  And some more science fiction.  I wrote more paranormal.  And I knew that I was going to get around to fantasy.  I love fantasy.  I love all kinds of fantasy, and I write all manner of it in short fiction all the time.

I just hadn’t had the right bug bite me to do a series of it, and I was still trying other things.

And then Verida happened.

And now my fantasy collection rivals either other major genre.

(Seriously?  I’ve got the wordcounts in my spreadsheet.  Adding them up quickly: Verida is 2M, urban fantasy/paranormal is 4.3M, and science fiction is 1.4M.  Sam and Sam is 2.7M all by itself.  I love big universes.)

I’m wrapping up the big sprint (ha, if an ultramarathon can be considered a sprint) on Verida, and looking to the future, and hence we arrive in NOVEMBER.

For those who haven’t found a November post, before, I do a very big writing effort every year for November.  It’s fantastic and energetic and… sadly maturing a bit, but that’s okay.  It’s still the high holiday of my writing calendar, and it is also when I look forward at the next year’s writing plans.

I will finish the Hill Chargers series for December, which means that the core series of Verida (can I hashtag it?  #Veridaverse anybody?) are complete.  I’ve still got a lot of plot left in… most of them, but they’re at that happy place where I’m allowed (by my rules) to walk away and do other things.

Which means that I’m thinking about what I want to do next, and this year I have come to a different conclusion than I have in many of my past years.  I’ve also telegraphed this a lot of other places, which… steals my own thunder, but whatever.  I’m still allowed to unpack the decision and put it into a planning post because the fact that the core decisions are already made doesn’t make the thinking behind them unuseful.

My readers want *more*.

They always do.

They’re supposed to.

And while very few of them (if any) would gripe to my face if I decided to go write a new series in a new universe, I’ve reached a point from a business prospective (uck, I know) where I think that my wisest course is to actually do it.

Write more books.

In existing universes.

Existing series, even.

I have favorite series.  I know that I do.  I’m even allowed to.  The funny thing is that, when I go involve myself in one, I find that I really love that world and those characters, and it’s *better* than I remember that series being.  (I say that cautiously, because being an author is a very strange paradox of profound self-confidence, trying to charge people money for things I made up in my head, and self-doubt, looking back at all of those stories and all of those series and knowing that *I made them up*.)  A lot of it is because I move onto another series that I involve myself with profoundly, and I can’t remember the previous series with the same intensity that I experience the present one.  It’s a very special series that stays with me through that.

Long way to say, I love my stories and my work, and if I were completely divorced from the economic reality of it, guys, I would do some crazy stuff.  Like… some of you would go with me on it, but… crazy.  Yeah.  But given that my goal is financial independence, just based on my writing income, I have to make pragmatic decisions about what I’m going to write.  There’s nothing wrong with that, and there are no series I have written *just* because I think that they’re going to sell.  Not ever.  But I do have a handful of series, the most popular ones, that they’re easier to put into people’s hands and had them know that that was the thing they wnated.

And once I’ve got readers who read those series, they want MORE.  I don’t have to go find them again.

So I think that my next evolution as an author, and as a businesswoman, is to take those series that have the strongest popularity and actually do what my readers ask me to do: write MORE.

Now, I’m going to do it my way.  Because when have I ever done anything the normal way?

I’ve come to a strong conclusion that I really like writing books four at a time.  It gets me deep into a world, it lets me build *really* big arcs that go across multiple books, but it gives me a sense of *seasonality*.  This thing starts, it hits a middle, and then it’s *done*.  And done is important for me.  It gives me something that I’m working toward, then I hit my moment of transition, of metamorphosis, and I can go and be something different.  I avoid the sensation that I’m just going to do this one thing until I die, even if *that one thing* is the one thing I most want to do.

So I’m going to write four books at a time, in four different series, for eight books a year.  I looked at it, did some strategic planning, threw some bird feathers in the air, then said ‘screw it’ and made a decision on the order of these four series additions.

In 2024, I’m going to release 4 new books in The Queen’s Chair, and 4 new books in The Carbon Chronicles.  (Spoiler: in 2025, I’m going to do 4 new books in School of Magic Survival and 4 new books in Tell, the Detective.)  In that order.  I’ll be starting book 5 of The Queen’s Chair sometime this month, depending on how much momentum I can generate, finishing out Hill Charger’s 4 as I head out the door for the 20Books conference.

I’m not done, there.  I also plan on releasing a 4-book collection of novella-length stories in a new setting, each year, but I haven’t announced those because those are *really* big writing goals, and I don’t want to make promises that I end up not keeping.  i do that sometimes, anyway, but I do try hard not to.  Ideally, The Queen’s Chair 5-8 would come out in January-May of 2024, and Carbon Chronicles 5-8 would come out September-December of 2024, with 4 novellas coming out in June, July, and August (plus one bonus title that’s already written and is just patiently awaiting its moment in the timeline), making 13 titles in 2024.

My ability to get that much done depends on a lot of things, so I’m just going to stick with the topline goal of 8 full-length novels in two existing series, and we’ll see how far I get on the stretch goal.  I’ll probably update as I go along, because I really can’t help doing it, but you have to be in the right places to see those updates go by.

Not everything ends up in a blog post.

Sorry about that.

In some ways, it’s… a bit… disillusioning? disappointing? to have a two-year plan in front of me that I’m so confident in.  The Verida plan was 4 years long, but I knew that it was going to get jumbled around a bunch as I figured things out.  There were things that I didn’t write, there were things that I wrote out of order, and there were things that I pushed to write some other time.  I probably even added a few things that I didn’t anticipate.  It was a very open canvas, even after I wrote it all down, and for a pantser like myself, that mystery is the excitement of the thing.

A this point, I genuinely don’t see myself swapping out the plan for anything less than a movie deal.  Probably not literally, but that’s the level of not-gonna-happen I’m considering.  I’ll cut the novellas as I must in order to hit the schedule on the novels, but the 8 book headline titles are pretty much set.

And that’s *good*.

It’s mature.

I ought to have a five-year plan with similar levels of confidence, probably.  Or at least a consistent two-year plan that I’m going to stick to as I’m still making up year three.

But in some ways, there’s a feeling that this is a business plan, rather than a creative one.  I’m *not* making things up as I go along.  Before Verida’s madness, I would genuinely get to the end of a series and ask: okay, what am I going to do next?

And that was scary, but it was also exciting.

I think that my career is evolving, that I’m making decisions that are more than just random guesses and headstrong impulses at what I want to do next.  Which means that they’re probably better decisions.

And it isn’t that I’m not excited about the books.  Ohmygoshyouguys I want to get back into these universes.  I *miss* these characters.  I *grieve*, leaving them behind.  Possible that 2026 is another year of existing series, too, either Ever in a Pirate’s Eye and Murderers, Thieves, & Velvet, or The Queen’s Chair and Carbon Chronicles.  There’s more story.  I know there is.  These aren’t characters who are just going to settle into a nice, quiet life and stop going against the problems in the world around them.

This is what I live for, these characters, these worlds.  And I don’t think that the sense of… loss of magic is that I’m going to write existing series.  I’m profoundly excited about that.  I think it’s that I know what’s going to happen.

Not in the books.  I never know that.

But month by month.

I’ll come around.  It’s just a very new state of being, professionally, and I am not a planner, by nature.  I had a sign on my door as a teenager that read ‘geniuses thrive on clutter’.

At any rate, I don’t know that I intended to be this transparent, setting out, but this is the state of my year, the state of my plan, and the state of my mind.

It’s going to be a great year, and there are going to be some great stories.

Happy November, y’all.  Here’s to a great year to come.

On the KU payout rate and attendant drama

I’m supposed to be writing, presently.  Had two really strong days and then sat down to work today and just wasn’t feeling it, so you’re getting this instead.

If you have no idea what ‘attendant drama’ I’m talking about, or what a KU payout rate is, this post is genuinely not for you.  This is author-business stuff, and apparently authors have started bringing it to their readers and, presto, drama has happened.

Panic begets blame, and blame begets counter-accusation, or guilt, or disconnect and avoidance.

And authors are panicking.

(They do this.)

(I am sincerely not even remotely innocent of it.)

(Just not in this case.)

You’re welcome to hang out and read, if you’re curious, but… my business is my business, which makes it my problem and not yours.  I make decisions based on various things, including how much income I think I’m likely to make based on those decisions (though hardly exclusively: see the randomness in my back catalogue…), and some of those may inconvenience or bother some readers.  I’m routinely told on my Facebook ads that I ought to be boycotting Amazon because they’re evil.

I continue to sell on Amazon regardless.

I love my readers, I appreciate them immensely, and I often do things simply because I imagine those things making a certain subset of readers happy, but I am also tasked with running a business whose purpose is to make money that I spend on things that are important to myself and my family.  I don’t get to blame anyone else for the things that don’t go the way I’d hoped they would – unless someone actually cheated me – and I don’t get to get angry about it, either.

I presume that that good faith goes both ways.

If I change something, you, the reader, understand that it’s because I need to, to try to make the most of my business, of my writing, and of my life-energy.

I am not, at present, changing anything.  (This is not an announcement; I wouldn’t have excused the disinterested reader if it were.  Promise.)

But there are authors all around who are, because the payment structure of Kindle Unlimited is attempting (wittingly or otherwise) to boil the frog slowly.

Let me explain.

I’m not going to go back to KU1.0, where authors were paid for every book that got borrowed from Amazon (henceforth: KU), regardless of how long it was.  That was an epic disaster of unintended consequences, and while it makes a wildly amusing story to tell, I’m longwinded enough by nature, and I’m going to excise that bit from this story.

Kindle Unlimited 2.0 (and all other subsequent revisions) paid authors per ‘page’ that was read.  There was complexity in how ‘pages’ were counted, when ebooks… don’t have those, but they made up a formula and kept it super-duper-top-secret, assigning a total number of pages to each book that I and every other author upload to Amazon to participate in KU.  At some point, they went back through and re-calculated these, dropping most of my books by about 20%.  This annoyed me, because it did somewhat feel like cheating, because I don’t recall getting an e-mail from Amazon or seeing a press release disclosing that they were doing it, but perhaps I missed it.  I do try to keep my head down.

In short, though, Amazon keeps track of every page that you read of any book you happen to borrow through KU, and they pay the author/publisher of that piece for each of those pages.  The incentives here are reasonable.  Good books that keep readers reading are paid; bad books that people don’t enjoy and don’t read don’t get paid.  Cool.

The first problem comes in the fact that Amazon waits two months to tell us how much they’re going to pay us for those reads.  And the number, like the number of pages in my books, is a super-duper-top-secret calculation.  It’s not predictable, outside of some seasonal gyrations that are somewhat reliable.  (Even those aren’t something you *rely* on, but you might plan for them.)

So every reader that I go hunting for (and I am, ultimately, a professional reader-hunter…) costs me time and energy, but I don’t know how much I’m going to make from those readers – even the ones who read a book or four books or sixteen books – until two months later.  This makes profit calculations very challenging, especially as the ebook market has grown rather tight and profit margins for authors who are still working to break out are smaller than they used to be.  (I’m not going to get into my exact numbers, nor estimations of the industry at large, because quite frankly I have no idea where I sit in the industry at large, whether I’m doing rather well or quite poorly.  I just know that more and more authors are spending more and more on advertising, and this is our reality.  Readers don’t find books for free, in numbers that I or most authors can count on.)

This is a problem, but this is a publicly-stated problem, one that I knew about, going into KU.  (You’ll find that every *other* problem fits this category, as well, as I go on.)

The second problem is of exclusivity.  KU expects me, as a self-published author, to restrict my content to Amazon, in exchange for the priviledge of being in KU.  Putting my work for sale on other platforms means giving up KU payments (which total about 75% of my revenue, with some rather significant variation from series to series).  It annoys me that other publishers and other authors are able to negotiate this away, that Amazon allows their books to be in KU and on other platforms, but I don’t know what contract they actually got, what payment model is used for their books, and *I agreed to this situation*.  I am free to leave.  My KU term is 90 days, and then it automatically re-enrolls me unless I unclick a checkbox.  It’s that simple to get out.  Most/many trad-pub contracts were historically for like 10 years and are now for the life of the copyright; ACX contracts are for 7 years.  I do not feel like Amazon is taking unreasonable advantage with the terms of the contract they offer me.  I am a small fish in an enormous ecosystem, but I am largely free to make the best of the decisions available to me.

I give up opportunities to be in KU.  I cannot sell at Barnes and Noble or Apple; I cannot open a webstore and sell my own content, notably even repackaged, because I have agreed that *that* content will only be available on Amazon.  (One major exception here is reviewer copies; I am allowed to give away reviewer copies without infringing on this agreement.  Just… fyi.)

But I give them up with full information and the freedom to control my own outcomes as I choose.

These things are nobody’s fault, and they are nobody’s problem but mine.

Enter the drama.

Every month, Amazon announces the per-page payout for the reads from two months back.  These payouts have been progressively dropping, year over year, since the program debuted (and keep in mind the 20% cut to pages which acts like a stealth-drop in payout, along the way), and authors are constantly facing the crucial question: how much further can rates drop before the value of KU is exceeded by the opportunities I have elsewhere?

And that’s a scary question.

Building an audience outside of KU, especially when you’ve been cultivating a KU audience for years, sometimes, is a lot of work.  It is unknown.  It is risky and scary and everyone (including me) would much rather everything just keep working the way it has been, or at least the way it used to, where they could count on a certain behavior and a certain return on successful behaviors.

The drop in rates last month was not that big, in the grand scheme of things.

But for the first time, it dropped below 40c per 100 pages read.  (This is the unit I’ll use in discussing the actual rates, because it’s something you can actually understand.  Amazon publishes the rate per page, which is hard to scale to make sense.)

For context, my books tend to run 400-700 pages, which means that I’m getting $1.60 to $2.80 per full read, at this rate.

For further context, I make about $3.50 for a book priced at $4.99, and $2.70 for a book priced at $3.99.

I make less for a KU reader than I do for a purchasing reader, but KU readers, on average, read a lot more of my stuff, and on a per-reader basis, I think that it about averages out.  Either way, I would never ask a KU reader to switch over to purchasing – because I made the business decision to be in KU.  I am inviting them to read my book for no marginal cost to them (they just pay their subscription fee), and I will take the compensation I get from that.

Happily.

(Truly.)

But the day is coming that I may need to change my mind.

Take a look:

After some tumultuous swings at the very beginning, what we have here is a relatively steady downward trend in compensation per page.  Calculated a slightly different way, this is the % shift in compensation based on an (arbitrary) assumption of $0.45 per 100 pages:

What looks like ‘just noisy’ is income, to a writer.  In 2018, KU authors were making 10% above $0.45, while for the last six months, they’ve been making 10% below $0.45.  It’s a drop of roughly 20% of total compensation (ignoring any page-length adjustments; I cannot find evidence anywhere that these were widespread, so they may have just happened to me) over about 5 years.

If you took a job and – having been happy with the pay you expected to make at it – they told you that you ought to expect to take a paycut of about 4% a year, and no one had any proof that those paycuts were going to stop any time soon, and you were a good person, you would work hard, do the best you could at your job, and meanwhile start looking for a job that is going to pay you *more*, every year, or at least not less.

Writers are up against a hard slope, here.  And they deal with inflated costs on *everything*, the same as anyone else.  A quick online calculator says that inflation from 2018 to 2023 is about 20%, meaning that those 40 cents per 100 pages are worth more like 32 or 33.

Amazon, wittingly or otherwise, is boiling the frog slowly, dropping the rate that it pays KU authors month by month and year by year, and some authors are finding that the risk of staying with KU looks like it might be smaller than the risk of trying to sell everywhere.

They’re leaving.

This is a business decision, and I wish them well at it.  Someday, I might make the same one.

Other authors, though, are getting angry and blaming readers.  Here, I have a problem, because KU is a business decision, and you cannot offer your books to KU readers and then get angry at them for taking advantage of that availability.

And in blaming the readers for their declining revenues, they’ve made readers defensive or guilty or disinterested, and that’s a problem, too.

I love my readers.  I appreciate them.  And they should *not* feel guilty for using any avenue that I freely select to procure my books.

Authors are working harder to find readers, and they’re getting paid less to do it.  THIS IS HARD.  But opportunities are not guaranteed to anyone, and being in a creative industry means doing stuff that most people genuinely *wish* they could do with their lives, but as a profession.  Dude, that’s so cool.  I *tell stories*, and people pay me for it.

Awesome.

The creative industries are hard-hard-hard because they’re a dream for so many people.  They’re super-duper competitive, and finding more people who want to be writers is… kind of really easy.  We’re easy to replace, in a commodity kind of sense.

Authors are making hard, risky decisions, now in particular but all the time also, and it’s making some of them emotional and angry, and that’s understandable.  I wanted to capture where that feeling is coming from, and give it a real legitimacy.  Whether or not the pool of KU readers has grown a lot in recent years (it has), non-breakout writers like me are still out hunting for every single reader they get, and doing that profitably takes more and more time, more and more knowledge and energy, and carries more and more risk that something is going to upset things and turn profits to losses.

If you read my work legally?

Thank you thank you thank you.

You don’t owe me a thing.

But if you’re mocking authors for tearing their hair out publicly over a .0001 change in their compensation… mercy, friend.  They’re nurturing a career forged of eggshells, and every frog here is considering making the jump, while worrying about exactly what fire we’re going to land in if we do it.

Hill Chargers

The other forbidden story topic.

When I was young, I was obsessed with horse books.  I had many, I wanted more, and I talked about them a lot.

The Black Stallion and Black Beauty and the Thoroughbred series…  I wrote a letter to Johanna Campbell (I don’t even have to look up her name, all these years later) and the lovely woman wrote me back.

I played with horse stories, writing them, all the time growing up, and for a long time, that childish obsession and the inability to write things that weren’t just screaming for attention kind of mixed together, and I couldn’t write horses.

Not like those.

I have horses.  Around.  Sarah Todd has them, notably, and they turn up in my short stories from time to time, too, but I’ve stayed away from stories about people who live with and among horses, because it just had that big warning sign on it that this was dangerous water for me, and I needed to stay away.

Until now.

I mentioned that pirates were much the same, but horses were the deep risk, and I decided a couple of years ago that I was done with it and I was going to write what I liked.

And that meant that, as I was planning The Queen’s Chair, I always knew that I was going to end up here, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to find when I got here.

I loved writing pirates.  Taking that light and air and color and sticking a character into it who was just… light, almost weightless, was truly some of the most fun I’ve had writing.

The Hill Chargers are different from that, but I think I was ready for it, coming into it, because I’ve been working *around* these people for more than 12 novels, now.

The Queen’s Chair was an adventure, an introduction to the city, to the importance of what’s going on there and the events that happen at the heart of the Veridan story, the ones that everyone knows where they were when it happened.  Verida and her city-history is not the driving motivation of any of the series, but it is closest, with The Queen’s Chair.  While this was the first series of proper fantasies I’ve released (ignoring the existence of other shorts that are properly fantasy and predate The Queen’s Chair), this was a structure that was very familiar.  Murderers, Thieves, & Velvet is a series of heists.  There’s a lot of other plot running around in that series, but that’s what they are.  They’re heists, the first I’ve ever written, and it was a lot of learning to do something new as I built them.  Great fun.

Pirates was different, again.  Back to adventure, but with three main characters off on their own storylines, and… Casset was a very different character than I’ve written before.  It wasn’t as big a leap as Murderers, Thieves, & Velvet, but it was new to me all the same, and different from the other two series in the world.  Add in the Trials of the White Princess novellas (with one more of those due in the first half of 2024), which are all but proper romances (wut?) and are very different *again* from anything else I’ve got going on, because these are focused on the relationship between the main two characters and… I’ve covered a lot of genre ground.

And now we have Hill Chargers.

I’ve taken to calling these pastoral fantasies, which doesn’t appear to be a term in common use (I found a series of Hungarian musical compositions that called themselves that, but nothing in fiction), but it still feels like the right term.  The stories are set outside of civilization for almost their entire span, and it’s about a small group of nomadic people making a fully-pastoral existence.  I’ve also referred to them as family dramas, and that’s also true, particularly in the first book, where a lot of the conflict is about relationships and roles within the family and the clan.  They’ve been described as quiet and as solid in reviews and conversations.

They’re a strong contrast to Casset and his lack of awareness of context and consequences.  The hillfolk are very much responsible for their own survival, day by day, and they take it quite seriously.  That said, they are some of the happiest characters I’ve ever written, either.  They sing and they dance and they love and they explore and they adventure.  They’re lovely people with a lovely culture, and being with them is charming and… beautiful.  To my eyes, these people are beautiful.

And that’s before we even meet the Hill Chargers.

I saw a meme at one point that referred to rhinoceroses as high capacity assault unicorns, (I’ll try to find it to include it here) and I kind of really loved that idea.  Hill Chargers are high capacity assault horses.  They’re warhorses who are preternaturally large and powerful, and while the Veridans have them in small numbers, the hillfolk hold the secret of breeding them, and this is something that is central to how they think of themselves.  They are horse breeders, by identity, and the bloodlines of their Hill Chargers are something they inherit from their forefathers and they pass on to their children.  This is who they are.

And here we find the thing that brought my story to this place and this people.

The Hill Chargers are smart and beautiful and *huge* and rugged and independent… they are everything I wanted horses to be, when I was young and reading all of those horse books.  They are *magic*.

Because horses are.  You may not know it, but they are.  They’re magic.

But if you do know… you know.  I wanted to capture the *feeling* of being young and in love with a species of animals who were unspeakably elegant and beautiful, and to have those animals be a part of *life*, not just stashed away in a box over there, and that’s what I’ve gone for, among other things.

I’m going to tell you that these are horse stories, but they aren’t.  They’re about a family and a culture and growing up and finding a way and all of these much more grown-up ideas, but… they are.

They’re horse stories.

I hope that you love them as much as I have.

Verida: a suggested reading order

I know I’ve owed you guys this. I write big, messy universes, and the goal is to have the order among series not be critical, but there’s still an *intended* sequence to things, so I’m going to write it down.

I’m also adding a reading order graphic to all of the series book pages, which looks something like this, and will tell you where you are in the present series:

Without further commentary:

Start:

The Queen’s Chair (#1)

The Faerie’s Secret (The Queen’s Chair #2)

The Rogue’s Bargain (The Queen’s Chair #3)

The Queen’s Seal (The Queen’s Chair #4)

Murderers & Thieves (Murderers, Thieves, & Velvet #0)

The Marriage of the White Princess (White Princess Novella 1)

Murderers, Thieves, & Velvet (#1)

Vengeance on a Slow Boil (Murderers, Thieves, & Velvet #2)

Daggers, Needlers, & Skites (Murderers, Thieves, & Velvet #3)

Spilling Time (White Princess Novella 2)

Velvet on a Black Moon (Murderers, Thieves, & Velvet #4)

Ever in a Pirate’s Eye (#1)

Forging of the Phoenix Fleet (Ever in a Pirate’s Eye #2)

Phoenix of the Burning Seas (Ever in a Pirate’s Eye #3)

Pirate of Gold and Stone (Ever in a Pirate’s Eye #4)

This is what is complete as of Summer 2023

Coming in 2023 and 2024:

Hill Chargers #1

Hill Chargers #2

Hill Chargers #3

Hill Chargers #4

The Queen’s Chair #5

Final Day (White Princess Novella 3; subject to sequencing change)

The Queen’s Chair #6

The Queen’s Chair #7

The Queen’s Chair #8

An April 2023 warm take on AI art

Okay, so I think best when I write, and it helps me to sort out the details and the knife-edge of the decisions about what I believe, which means that this is the best medium I know for sorting through something that has been rocking the indie world (and, indeed, the rest of it, too) for the past few months.

How far back does AI go?  I had a fight with author-friends last fall over whether AI was capable of making authentic-looking, 3-D human faces based on a dataset of finite pictures taken of human beings.  Given what I was looking at, at the time, I still think I was right, but it was something of a heated fight, so let’s ignore the feelings that have gone into that one and move on.

AI is relatively new.  In a lot of ways, it is shockingly new.  And in some other ways, it is absolutely and mundanely old.  I’ll get there.  But any time something this powerful and this novel begins its existence, people react in a wider range of ways than normal.  Some people think that it is the bright, shining light of the future, and they dive in as hard and fast as they can figure out how to do it, determined to beat everyone else to the sunrise.  Some people think it is the death-knell of human existence, the harbinger of genuine species extinction.  I exaggerate, but by a small enough amount that it actually makes me uncomfortable.

And when you have people who are chasing after the future that is going to leave all pasts behind mixing with people who are screaming ‘it’s going to kill us all’, communities get divided and they get divisive.  And that’s a shame, but it’s also the thing that keeps us alive as a species.  Some guy goes chasing off after a bright new idea, and if he fails… he dies.  If he succeeds?  Well, everybody else watches real close and figures out that he was right, all along, and they (gradually, and often with strong resentment) shift over to pick up the threads that led to his eventual success.  There’s nothing wrong with this process or the outcomes that it drives, other than that it makes people angry at each other in the meantime.

I think that we’ll figure it out, and we’ll manage.  I could be wrong.

But in the midst of all of this, I’ve been struggling to work out what I actually, personally, think of the technology that is disrupting my industry, and which has the potential to be *all the more* disruptive over the next 5 to 10 years.

And I think I’m there.

(Which means I’m finally ending the introductory section.  Hang tight, y’all.  This is going to be one of the longest pieces I’ve posted, I suspect.  Nature of the beast.)

Let me start with this: I genuinely, passionately, and irrevocably believe that we have misnamed AI as a species.  Okay?  I’m going to use the generally-accepted definition, from here forward, but I want to at least put my mark in the sand and say that what we are playing with is NOT AI.  It is a set of sophisticated predictive algorithms based on larger and larger databases of information with more and more sophisticated analysis of that information.  This is not “intelligence”, artificial or otherwise.  It is a tool built by a human mind to do computations that that human mind has programmed it to do.  In my work (to date) I have always had a requirement that AI must be able to modify not just the databases of information that it has access to, but *its own software*.  It must be able to *learn* how to *think*, not just think about more stuff faster.  There are a lot of existential questions in this definition about what makes a human different from a thinking machine, and there are a lot of gotcha questions (what is a human if not simply a synthesis of all of the information put into it???) that I don’t want to get derailed by, as that is not the central thesis of what I want to talk about here, but I think that asking ‘is it self-aware’ (which is coming up *a lot*) is a clear indication in my mind that people are unable to understand the distinction between a sophisticated predictive algorithm and software that can self-modify.  Self-modification is part of agency.  It infers *choice*.  Sophisticated data analysis just allows you to sound exactly like a human being in the generic (or the specific – write an essay in the style of…).  I find this of *enormous* importance, when we discuss the nature of AI, but it is entirely irrelevant to the rest of this thought-stream.  Fin.

AI started to be a part of my awareness with image-generation.  As I mentioned, human faces.  And then art.  And then came the apocalypse of cover designers who think that their industry is going to be eradicated by AI cover generation, which is a *fear*, but not an argument, and I started making the argument that if you are using a database of images as source input, and those images have legitimate IP holders (copyright), then all images that come *out* of that database are copyright infringements.  I continue to hold this view.  There are image databases that have done a genuine best-effort to only use public-domain art, and if that were knowable and true, I would have no reservation using this type of tool for for-profit image generation, so long as the tool does not attempt to claim that copyright.  The fact that a technology decimates a productive industry does *not* make it evil.  Or even bad.  In an economic mindset, all of those people who were occupied within that industry are now going to go find something more productive to do with their time, as the work that they *were* doing has been lifted off of them.  In the reality, there’s a very real, very disruptive, and very uncomfortable process to finding a new productive use of your mind and body, and for some people, their personal lives may never be as good as they were before the disruption.  But in the aggregate, the *world* is better and more prosperous because the disruption happened.

And, yes, this may happen to authors, too.  I see it, and I’ll get there.

The more moderate viewpoint is that what AI art is going to do is it is going to free up these productive minds to generate *enormous* quantities of high-quality art much faster, driving down their prices at the same time that it drives up their profits.  And some artists may not make that corner.  But the ones who do have the potential to be even more prosperous than they were before.

This is what I believe, within the specific domain of cover art.

Incredible covers are coming, as we master the technology and the methods of implementing it, and I am ridiculously excited about it.

And then AI came for the writers.

ChatGPT is not the first language database trying to parse language and react to it.  Spellcheck is very much the same technology, in the sense that charcoal was the predecessor to pens, which were the predecessor to word-processors.  So anyone who looks you in the face and says they use NO AI AT ALL is giving you a piece of information that is relatively worthless, because they haven’t defined what AI is, and it is a broad, fluid category of tools that are available to varying subsets of the population.  What they *mean* is that they chose every word in the piece that they have written, and that they did not use a tool that was intended to change the *quality* of that language so much as put it back at where it was intended to be.  That is, they used tools that fix their mistakes, but not improve their choices.

It’s a fine line.  I might go so far as to say I *like* that line.  It’s clean.  You know that the words you are writing are from the mind of an individual human being, not the slurry of human awareness that is represented by a more sophisticated and involved AI tool.

But it’s also a limiting line.

Because tools are *tools*, and they can improve what we do, both in quantity and quality, and saying that I drew this picture *fully by hand* rather than using a ruler for the straight lines is a rather absurd brag.  There *is* extra value in having the original copy of a piece of art, but using a machine to create many additional copies of that piece of art means that I can have a masterpiece on the wall in my office.  Yay for everybody.  Artist makes more, because more of his art can go into the world, and the world gets more art.

And art has value.

So using AI beyond the efforts to make things as you intended means that there may be potential increases in both quantity and quality (see cover art) and this increases the quantity of art in the world as well as the quality of art in the world.

This is not a BAD thing.

It may even be an all-the-way GOOD thing.

Depending on how it is used.

And here is where I have been struggling, and why I am writing a warm-take.  This isn’t a hot-take.  I’ve been chewing on this – a LOT – for weeks.  It’s not a spicy take.  I don’t have a lot of emotions wrapped up in this analysis.  But it also isn’t a cold take.  I may very well decide that I missed some key details and swerve away from this stand *entirely*, and it will not bother me at all.  I have no vested interest in standing by this analysis and saying it is right, and every other analysis must agree with it or be flawed.

How do authors use a tool like ChatGPT or Sudowrite or any of the other blossoming writing tools out there and keep the faith of their audience?  How do they keep faith with themselves?  What is the *point* of art?

These are HARD questions.

And I’m hanging out with people who are out, exploring the edges of them.  A number of them *may* be out beyond those edges.  I’m not ready to cast judgments, but I do have concerns.

And… herewego.

My hot-take reaction was that I felt like my readers would be disappointed if they found out that a machine was creating substantial contributions (plot decisions, character voices, narrative voices) within my books.  Even more disappointed to discover that a machine was creating *most* or *all* of those things.  And I don’t want to disappoint my readers.

(Another aside – IKNOW – I do not use any tool beyond Microsoft spellecheck at this time.  I am looking at ChatGPT and other tools to write back-cover copy (blurbs) and advertising copy, because I’m terrible at those, and because the purpose of those is to summarize and entice the creative content, not be creative content unto themselves.  I am not opposed to using ChatGPT for copy editing, to highlight what it believes is *weak* or redundant language for me to see whether or not I agree.  This is in the realm of ‘editor’, and having an editor who represents the generic language and usage of human beings is not inappropriate.  With the technology as it exists today, using it for much more than that – the actual creative side – would slow me down, because I am a very fast and very decisive writer, and I don’t use outlines. In the future, this balance may change, and I will be evaluating tools in the context I’m going to discuss below – what is the right use of tools in art.  As it sits today, it’s a very simple, tactical decision.  Writing tools are a back-end, not a front-end process.)

But these things exist on a continuum, and ‘letting a machine write the whole book’ is a universe away from ‘did I find every instance where I typed though instead of through’.  And somewhere between here and there, there’s a limit on what we *should* be doing.  Or there isn’t.

The first and most important question is: what is art for?

And we’ve been fighting over this for probably as long as we’ve been making it.  The literary world looks at the genre world (me!) and says that what I’m doing is *not* art, because it’s only there to entertain.  And I shrug that off with massive indifference, because I think that genre art often has a lot more freedom to look at what it means to be human because we aren’t constrained by the burdens and the details of the real world and its infinitely complex history.  Look at how fraught it is to write a black character or a gay character or a disabled character in the serious-writing world, and the arguments over who is even *allowed* to write those characters, and compare that with a fantasy world where racism is about species and not races.  No one can say what the lived experience of a leprechaun is, so we can actually talk about leprechaun-centaur relations in the general, without getting caught up on the details.

And art doesn’t have to be *topical* to matter.  Art is just there to talk about what it is to be human.  I have an instinct that ‘beauty’ and ‘human’ are basically different ways of trying to define the same thing.

There is a versa argument to this, though, and that says that art is there to *entertain*, and art that is not entertaining really doesn’t have much purpose to it, because it’s not reaching anyone.  (Entertain does not mean ‘make happy’.  You can be entertained by your grimdark or your romantic tragedy or your intense condemnation of the human existence, and it doesn’t mean you close the book and sigh contentedly.  But you read it because it stimulated your mind in a way that you wanted or needed, and that is entertainment.)  Art that is entertaining sells.  Art that does not entertain does not sell.  And to take that backwards, if you are selling, you are entertaining.

Which makes sales into virtue.

And from a cold, heartless economic perspective, I believe in this, to a 99% level.  Not all entertainment is good for you, therefore not all voluntary economic transactions are of net benefit to human prosperity.  Some things that you can buy *will* hurt you, and the fact that you volunteered doesn’t mean that it was virtuous.  (Though the fact that it was not virtuous also does *not* mean that someone should have intervened to stop you.  The world does not have to be divided into “virtuous” and “illegal”; it is okay for there to be space in the middle, because we *still* need those guys who are going to run off and try something stupid, and maybe die, because *they could still be right*.)

So when writers in my community say that they intend to generate 2000, 5000, 10000 titles a year using ChatGPT to spawn the content, the community *IMPLODES* violently, saying that they’re going to swamp *real* writers and destroy the industry and destroy lives and impoverish people and…

Nobody who is profoundly angry about this says: you’re not going to make any money at that.  (Plenty of people *do* say that.  But they aren’t angry.  They aren’t dawn-seekers nor doom-sayers.)  The people who think that this is going to end humanity react with credulity that this method is going to generate revenue.  Lots of it.  (There’s a third argument that putting 100M titles a year up onto Amazon that are all incoherent Chat-spawns is going to implode the industry to $0, but Amazon likes money too much for that to work.  I have faith.)  And that revenue is going to come at the expense of people who only write one book a year.  It’s going to STEAL all their readers.

Cold, heartless economist: SO WHAT?

If people are “entertained” by what they’re reading (and it isn’t hurting them), why would a good-faith human-prosperity-seeking analysis argue that it’s even a bad thing?

And that’s where I’ve been stumped.

HOW IS THIS A BAD THING?

Isn’t it good that people can find the pinnacle of their consumption value at the lowest possible cost?  What if every book was 25c?  So they could afford to read as many of them as their hearts desire, and they would all be exactly what they want?  Isn’t that *perfection*?

And it is.

Until you consider the intersection of art and machine.

Art is culture.  It is what it means to be human.  And it is strikingly individual.

It takes a billion minds to make up a human culture, and a lot of them are off thinking things that other ones would never even consider.  That some of them would even be repulsed by.  But those thoughts, those free-jumping, off in the weeds, dawn-seeking thoughts are what drive forward what it means to be human, particularly in an age of humanity where our context is changing so radically, generation by generation.

Cellphones mean that we can communicate with anyone, anywhere, any time.  Should we?  Who?  When?  Why?

Computers do the work that it used to take entire companies to do, and they do it quietly and in the background.

What should humans put their effort into, when they aren’t required to labor for survival?

What purpose does growing flowers have?

Why do humans play sports?

The problem with using a machine to express culture is that that machine has a normal-distribution of outcomes that ought to be relatively predictable.  It’s based on the inputs it used to train.  And there is, AT THE VERY BEST, a benign bias to that.  The culture that we will consume is limited, narrowed, and predicted by the learning algorithm that fed it, when we only consume machine-generated art.  As soon as people who CARE figure that out, though, there WILL (WILL, WILL, WILL) be a malignant bias introduced.  Because men WILL NEVER REST from trying to perfect the men around them.  It is often introduced as ‘in your best interest’.

And it may be a good faith, best attempt at perfecting human beings through their culture.

But it’s the same argument that anything that isn’t virtuous must be illegal.

It ropes in and contains all of the dawn-seekers before they ever set off.

And there are amazing horizons out there that you and I are going to die before anyone ever discovers them.

In MOST ways, we are living out on bright horizons our ancestors never dreamed of.

Dawn-seekers die a lot more often than those of us living in the comfy wisdom of conventional decisions, but they also discover all the best ideas.

So.

Should people be restricted from or shamed of creating 10,000 ChatGPT titles and putting them on Amazon to sell?

No.

I can’t make that argument, and I won’t.

But is it good art?

Absolutely not.  Because that machine, creating CULTURE, is only hitting the mean of the things that it has been trained on to predict with.  And I don’t trust that that cultural mean is benign.  Even more, I don’t trust that it is going to *stay* benign.

So.  It is tempting to make a promise, as a writer, about the things I WILL NEVER DO.  But I’m not going to.

This is a warm take.  I’m still learning and I’m still watching.  I think that tools that make things happen faster and better are almost exclusively good, in the context of broad human prosperity, and I think that using those tools in a way that does not over-shape art is almost uniformly good.  But I’m concerned that there are going to be a lot of times and places where those tools replace the human soul, and that is a net loss.  And somewhere in the middle, there’s going to be a line that I solidify down onto, but I don’t know where it is yet.

If you’ve made it this far, my profound appreciation to you.  These are exciting, troubling times, with all the upside potential and all the downside risk still in play.  The solution is not to shut down everything and stay as we are, but to allow experiments and discussion to try to capture as much of that potential and warn off as much of that risk as we can.  Thanks for going with me.

-Chloe

Pirates!

When I set out writing as an adult, there were a certain set of subjects I resolved I was unfit to write.

Topics that I knew better, because I still had a very childish relationship with the subject matter.

I would not write horse books.  I would not write unicorns.  I would not write pirates.  I would not write dolphins.  I would not write dragons.

For a certain period of years when I was young, I read nothing but horse books.  Every book in every series.  I had my horse book friends, and we did nothing but talk about the contents of these books.  Specifically, note, these are the-horse-and-the-girl-who-loved-it books.

I also read The Black Stallion and Black Beauty and the like.

But, no, the horse and the girl who loved it was at the center of my reading heart, and I would forgive those books anything.

A teacher took my mother aside and told her that it really was time for me to find some more mature reading material, and I moved on to Robert B. Parker and Tom Clancy not long after this.  She was right, my teacher.

It was time.

I don’t think she anticipated The Hunt for Red October, but whatever, man.  I had good bookshelves to pick off of, and if I was going to pick a book, it was going to be one of the big ones.

Horse books were a major event for a specific age of my life, and because of how young that age was and because of how emotionally enthusiastic I was about them, I’ve known through most of my maturity that writing them was a bad idea, because I was going to write them like an eight-year-old.

Revertigo.

It’s a force of nature.

Fast-forward to the Big Bold Plan, where I discovered Verida and started dropping characters into it left and right.  They all fit.  They all worked.

Verida is a huge city with a modicum of political structure and what so far appears to be a boundless capacity to adopt unexpected features.  I went from King’s Guard and merchants to underworld heist assassins and thieves without blinking.  An artist’s colony appeared, with a mysterious wandering bridge.  (I haven’t been there, yet, y’all, because I’m afraid it’s going to spawn its own series.  This is very possible.)

And as I was wandering around Verida, learning the geography and the water flow and the seasons, I realized that there were islands off the coast that were just crawling with pirates.

And I also realized that, as giddy and silly as Johnny Depp’s pirate ambiance made me, many years back, I’m able to write such a story without being unduly effected by that era of my life.

I’ve outgrown that overwhelming influence.

So I made a plan and I wrote pirates.

If you’ve read either The Queen’s Chair or Murderers, Thieves, & Velvet, you’ve met them, in their ones and twos.

Some of the things you believe about them are true.  Some of them aren’t.  Some of the pirates you’ve met or are about to meet have secrets that are going to turn out to be very well kept and very important, as things go along.  As with everything in Verida, the politics are important, and so are the economics.  Your friends can be opportunities and they can also be threats.  But I’ve grown to profoundly love the sun-soaked culture of sea and sand that emerges from the world of the Pirate Islands.

These are their own style of fun, and I hope that you enjoy them as much as I am.

Now.

You think I lost the plot of my own essay, starting out with horse books and how I can’t write them because I still think about horses like a dreamy-eyed eight-year-old.

Nope.

The day I gave myself permission to write pirates, I also gave myself permission to write horses.

Hill Chargers shows up this fall.

I cannot wait.

20November22

Some years ago, when I first started doing NaNo for November, I would settle in with my bowl of ceremonial leftover Halloween candy and my notes for the brand new book I was working on and a timer tab on my computer reset to 0:00:00 and I would wait for the stroke of midnight.

And then I would write.

Life is nowhere near that simple, these days, and while the bowl of ceremonial leftover chocolates remains, there’s very little else about my November 1 traditions that survive.

I was in the middle of a book for November first this year, so I continued writing it.  Because it’s on a deadline, and it needs to be the next thing I finish.

I was sick and had spent the entire evening running around after a pair of ninjas for trick-or-treating (most years I hobble them with excessively complex costumes, but this wasn’t the year for that, and we made *excellent* time, getting around the neighborhood) and by the time midnight came… I went to bed.

I did not write at 12:01am Nov1 this year for NaNo.

It is… characteristic.

I like to think about what I’m doing this year and what I want to be doing differently next year, as I hit these November posts.

They’re delightful, in truth, to get to take a step back and look at things from not only a strategic sense, but also a sense of navigation.  I can change the whole goal and reshape everything to fit that new goal, if that’s what I want.

This year, 2022, was the year of Verida.  By the end of the year, Queen help me, I will have put out 9 full novels in this world and two novellas.  I am loving writing these characters, and I have another eight novels planned in this world for next year, with two entirely new casts of characters.  And then I’m going to come back and fill in the gaps with additional books in The Queen’s Chair series and some other content that I have both planned and unplanned on my calendar.

I had originally planned to write a Carbon book over the summer, but that exploded rather spectacularly in my face as I did not get through my winter-and-spring season writing as fast as I had hoped, and reality hit me on some stuff that I’ll talk about a lot, later.

I did not write the first word of Carbon 5.

I do not know when I will.

And I really hate that that’s the truth, because I’ve promised it multiple times as the next project I want to get to, when things on the Veridan world are running smoothly and the way I want them to.

Somewhere around the summer of 2021, I wrote out a Big, Bold Plan, though, that called for just an enormous amount of fiction in Verida, and it has not disappointed me.  I’m going to finish this project the way I planned to.  I just don’t know what my excess resources are going to look like for getting to other series until this one is much closer to complete.

Because here’s the thing.

When I started this year, I though I’d put out 12 novels.

It was a goal I’d had before, and I’d never managed to get even close, but I was going to give it a shot, this year, because I had eight (okay, nine) on the schedule, and three that were complete manuscripts that just needed editing, formatting, covers, and… well, a lot of other things, but I digress.  The hours and hours of work on those pieces were done.

Twelve.

Nine and three.

If my count is right, I will put out seventeen major fiction products this year.

Four books from The Queen’s Chair, five books from Murderers, Thieves, and Velvet, three books from Sam and Sam, a MG novel that I wrote under another pen name as a gift to someone I love very much, two White Princess novellas, a Carbon boxed set, and a Tell boxed set.

What I’ve discovered, attempting (and so far accomplishing) this plan is that the energy I put into writing doesn’t translate boundlessly into the energy it takes to take a manuscript and make it into a product that is available for sale.

An hour of writing will net me a set block of words (and a full hour of writing generates a *lot* of words), but translate that into editing or into blurb-writing or into cover-specifying or a dozen other things that supplement the efforts behind finalizing a book, and the hours I *have* to put into writing just dry up.  And not just because I traded an hour of editing for an hour of writing.  No.  I traded fifteen minutes of blurb-writing for two hours of writing, because that’s how the conversion rate works.  I can sit down at the end of the night with lots of time to write, and discover that there’s no more juice left to go.

And being angry about it doesn’t change it.

Applying more force of will, my go-to move, hasn’t worked, either.

I no longer get to sit down with my writing life carefully arranged alongside my bowl of mini-sized Snickers and write my stories.

No.

Oh, no.

I’ve made things much more complicated than that.

And so is the world that I have built for myself this year.

Amazing things are happening.  I have a Facebook group where people talk to each other, and not just me.  I have a newsletter and I get e-mails periodically from people who are enjoying my stories.  The work that I’ve put in to learning how to use advertising platforms is paying dividends.  (Another time-trade for writing.)  I am no longer just a writer.  (NOT A DIG.  My only responsibility, for many years, was to write the next novel.  I was *only* writing.)  I now have many other things that need my life energy, and those things are *worth* that investment of energy.  Else-wise I wouldn’t do ’em.  I hope.

Meanwhile, my additional life complexity has gone up.  Nothing is quite as simple as it used to be (ha; they write songs about that, don’t they?) and I’m feeling it.  Making my life out into orderly shapes where I knew how the writing was going to fit into it has become a joke or a punishment, and I’m still just jury-rigging the entire thing together as I go along.

But I think the biggest thing has been the number of products that I’m investing into making them go.

And… I’m not going to slow down in 2023.

(Plot twist!)

I’m going to start working on audiobooks in either very late 2022 or the very beginning of 2023.  I’m going to continue putting out boxed sets and supporting novellas.  I’m going to do my honest-level-best to make Verida playing cards and game rulebooks available by Christmas of next year.

Because these things are worth doing.

But I’m going to stop trying to cram ‘spare’ books into every nook and cranny of my writing schedule.  If they happen because I manage a paradigm shift that is particularly effective in recouping lost writing time, fantastic.  I’m not going to take my foot off the pedal because the ‘main-line’ books are written for the year.

But I’m going to put together a four-and-four schedule for spring and fall of the year, and that is *all* I am going to *plan* on writing for the year.

Eight books.

A lot of people would laugh at that because it’s so optimistic, but in my 2021 Big Bold Plan, I was genuinely hoping that I would be able to expand up to around 10 a year by continuing to get better at managing my publishing tasks and responsibilities and by handing a few more of them off to other people.

That could yet happen.

But I’m no longer planning on it.

I’m not going to plan on completing a single novel over the summer, because I didn’t this year.  I worked on one every single day, but my wordcount for the full summer was less than one full novel, because life priorities took over and because I edited and released five novels.

And that was a really productive summer.

So, for those of you who are looking for the next Tell book or the next Carbon book or the next Surviving Magic: good news/bad news.

I have a lot of books that are in the schedule ahead of those books.

But when I get to them, there are going to be four of them all at once.

No kidding.

Ever in a Pirate’s Eye will be January through May of 2023, and Hill Chargers will be August through December of 2023.  There will be four additional books for The Queen’s Chair in January through May of 2024.  And that’s as far out as my schedule is firm, at this point.  After that, I may add one additional Veridan series, or I may move back to one of the other series, to add an additional four books to it.

Because this is how I write.  I thought that I would like doing just one book at a time in series, once I got the origin work done, but sitting down with a cast and really getting to live with them through a larger set of arcs and through the things that are going on with them from book to book: this is what I love about reading, and it turns out that it’s also what I love about writing.

So I owe apologies.  I thought that I could get these books written faster than I have, that I could find corners of spare time where one-off novels in existing series would be feasible, but 2023 is not the year for those, and I’m putting strain on my systems by constantly trying to wring out the resources to add them in.

Sometimes I wonder if it doesn’t look like I just can’t focus, that I’m off writing yet *another* series, when I have all of these existing series with readers who want the next book, but Verida is the project that interrupted everything, and it is absolutely nothing like unfocused.

It’s just enormous, a multi-year project that I am devoted to seeing through to the end of its ‘origin’ phase.  It just so happens that forming the origins of Verida is a lot bigger task than anything I’ve built so far.

I’m specifying covers for Pirates, now, and I’ll put in orders for card backs yet this year.  I’m not slowing down, but I am recognizing that my writing energy is finite, and I have to accept the trade-offs that come with a maturing product line.

I can’t just sit down and write, anymore.

The efforts of previous years have been too successful, and I’ve built too much that needs attention well beyond the initial words.

2023 is going to be a Veridan year, but with a lot clearer understanding on why and how I have to devote the focus that goes into these series.

I pushed myself harder than I should have this year, and while it hasn’t bitten me, I can’t do it again next year.  I need sustainable systems, and I need to respect the way that my writing energy is most effectively spent.

Verida has often felt like a mountain, towering over my head, of words yet to be written, but I sit at this moment at the veritable midpoint of the first four series, and I can see the finish line from here.

Bring on 2023.  I’ve got work to do and I can’t wait to see where things go from here.

Murderers, Thieves, and Velvet

 I’m overdue to put this up, but it’s been quite a hectic season.  I’m very much still learning my new processes as I’m working on writing and publishing at the same time, and even as that’s going on, my process for writing is evolving to fit my life.  It’s been a very busy year, and I’ll get into that much more in depth in my annual November post, but I’m letting the writing be first, the publishing be second, and the finding readers who are going to enjoy that writing be third, and those are a pretty complete set of priorities.

Writing can and always will absorb every spare minute I give it, of course, so the balancing act is a trick.

At any rate, I’ve wanted to write this, because this world is going to get BIG, and putting out the early signposts along the way is going to be helpful, I know, but I want to put a caveat out early that as much as I think I’ve got this beast figured out, every time I rotate it to go at it from a new angle, something surprises me.  For almost a year, every time I *touched* the world of Verida, it grew a new series.  I’m mostly past that (I think), but the order of things depends on things that aren’t set in stone – or clay, or sand – and that means that any ideas about order are just ideas until the book is out.

Murderers, Thieves, and Velvet.

This is book one of a four-book series that exists in one of the darker underworlds of Verida.  It is a perfectly safe place to start reading, but if you want my best plan, I would start with The Queen’s Chair and go through at least the first four books.  (For those reading this relatively contemporarily, yes, that means that I plan more books in The Queen’s Chair series; I consider it the core series of the world, and there is a lot more plot I want to advance there.)  There is also a prequel to Murderers, Thieves, and Velvet, and I think you can pick that one up when you want to, either at the end of the four books or before reading book 1.  It doesn’t have any spoilers in it for the main series, or for The Queen’s Chair.

If you have started with The Queen’s Chair, you have met Skite and Ella, Lord and Lady Westhauser.  Skite is also the Rat King, the power leader of the Black Docks, a place full of the dregs of society, where the police are least likely to be able to track down violent fugitives.  This is a land of murderers and thieves.

In his improbable spare time, Skite has put together a crew that does elaborate heists, nominally because Skite wants to lead by example and show the Black Docks that if they’re ever going to prosper, money has to come from outside the Black Docks, but mostly because these are the best of the best, and working with them is an awful lot of fun.  Writing this crew is really a blast, and I want to put in an aside here that most of the names in Skite’s crew are taken from a gaming team that I played with years ago.  The characters aren’t based on my old crew, not even a little bit, but I wanted to capture something of the flavor of playing around at something with a group that was really confident in each other and loved doing what they’re doing.  Life got complicated and full and I couldn’t spare the hours anymore, but I miss those relationships.

Aside ended, these books are all heists, at their core.  There’s a lot going on in the Black Docks and in greater Verida, and Skite can’t take a vacation from his responsibilities to go play, but at the end of the day, there’s something that’s worth taking, and they’re going to line up a shot to take it.

As far as reading order goes, looking back, looking forward, and making some best guesses, I think that I would recommend starting with The Queen’s Chair 1-4; then doing The Marriage of the White Princess (currently a newsletter exclusive, but moving to be on sale yet this year, I believe); Murderers and Thieves (book 0); Murderers, Thieves, and Velvet (book 1); Vengeance on a Slow Boil (book 2); Daggers, Needlers, and Skites (book 3); The White Princess: Spilling Time (may retitle before publishing, but this is the very sticky working title, so far; I’m hoping that this one will be a this-year book, as well, but… like I said, the balancing act has been quite an event, this year); Velvet on a Black Moon (book 4); and then the Pirates series, coming in 2023.  I’m hoping to be able to offer a collection of White Princess stories for summer 2023, but that’s getting way ahead of myself, and starting to creep into planning that I’ll include more formally in my November post.

*deep breath*

The White Princess stories are novellas featuring Skite and Ella, where Murderers, Thieves, and Velvet is about the heists, the crew, and the Black Docks.  I really wanted and needed to do both separately.

And then we get the pirates.

These stories have been a new challenge to write.  Heists want a different set of considerations than my normal arcs do, but I’ve loved how lively and quick they get to be, in places, and I’ve loved writing them.  I honestly don’t know if I’m done with Skite’s crew at book 4, but the fourth book is going to be a lot like the fourth book of The Queen’s Chair, where I’m going to (attempt to) leave the important arcs in a settled and content place, even as there’s always *stuff* going on in Verida.  The series may not be closed, but the first collection of stories in this series will be done in December 2022.

I genuinely hope that you enjoy them as much as I have.

First official Verida post

I talked a lot about it in my November 2021 post, late last year. If you want the full story of how Verida came into being, please check it out. (I knew for *sure* this wasn’t the first time I’d posted about Verida here. I just didn’t get it in the title.)

Tonight, The Queen’s Chair went live.

Gonna be honest with you: I’m anxious, but in an entirely new way.

Most of my series, I’ve got a 4-book arc planned, and I set it up so I drop the entire series over 3 or 4 months and then… I see what I’ve got.

And what I’m discovering is that it takes a *long* time to work through the back-end administration to start connecting a 4-book series with readers. (Hello!) It might take six months to really get a series going like it’s going to. It might take more. I’ve still got some series that I’d like to believe *aren’t* going like they’re going to, once I make another good connection or two on how to find the readers who are most going to enjoy them.

But the series is mostly done. I’ll add on one book at a time over the next few years, because I don’t know how to *finish* a series, but the arc that really needs to happen to introduce the characters and the world is done.

And The Queen’s Chair isn’t a four-book origin story. It’s a doorway to an entire world. I’m not looking at a 4-month commitment with a bunch of work afterwards to figure out who most wants to read these books. I’m planning at least two full years of big releases *in this world*, and probably *another* two full years after that.

The release that happened at midnight tonight is the first step in sixteen-or-twenty-six-or-forty books in a world that just… grabs me. And I’m not going to know whether this *thing* has worked tonight or four months for now or maybe even a year from now. For the first time, I am running alongside this release schedule, writing books as far out into the future as I dare plan, rather than writing a series, publishing it, and then looking at what I want to write to publish next.

I write in the range of 8-12 novels a year, regardless of what I publish (stay tuned on that; this could be a *very* interesting year for backlist releases), so it’s not that I’m pushing to write a lot more than I normally do. (Okay, I actually am, but it’s because this schedule has pushed a lot more writing earlier in the year, and I figure, once I’ve already met that rate through July, why not finish the rest of the year the same way? Who doesn’t like bonus books?) It’s that I’m making publishing plans – tonight – for book four in a series that I haven’t even started writing yet. Don’t even have titles.

Verida is going to force me to grow up as an independent publisher, and it’s going to force me to actually stick to a plan for more than six months at a time. There will be no ‘oh, that sounds like a great idea’ series, this year, nor next year. I’m putting together a publishing calendar that actually looks like it has strategy behind it.

(Gasp.)

During the first four months of the year and the last four months of the year, I will be putting up front-list, new series (all in Verida, for the time being). During the summer, I will be putting out backlist continuations on existing series.

If I get sick or have something going on in my life that I’m going to have to sacrifice something that’s on the plan, it will be those backlist titles. The front list new series are set in stone, as completely as I have the ability to make it so.

And I feel like my feet are on the first bricks of a path that I can’t see the end to.

Verida.

With no further ado, let me introduce the series:

The Queen’s Chair: a series about the political and economic heart of Verida. Isabella Gabriella Angelina Aurora Renata Anastasia Fielding-Horne is the spare daughter of a very, very wealthy merchant, and upon her arrival in Verida, she promptly gets herself tangled up with the King’s Guard and affairs of state. Verida is a dangerous city at the best of times, but when you’re working for the Queen, the stakes are big.

Murderers, Thieves, & Velvet: this is a series about Skite, the King of the Rats, and his crew. The Rats are one of Verida’s many underworld gangs, and Skite runs them because someone has to, but his crew are completely separate from the Rats, and this is where he shines as a leader and a tactician and a man who really knows how to nurse a grudge. The crew are the best of the best, and these books are heist books, at their hearts, though nothing is ever so simple as to *just* be a heist, when Skite is involved.

Ever in a Pirate’s Eye: these are books where the focus is split pretty evenly between Katrina Swift, the captain of the Flying Phoenix, and her First Mate, Casset. Katrina is cold and calculating with a fiery temper that would make her a very unpopular captain if not for Casset, who is best described as a cross between Jack Sparrow and Legolas, and who does the heavy lifting of managing the ship’s crew. They run around the Pirate Islands doing piratey things, except that Katrina really doesn’t like it when someone else’s plans get in the way of her own, and Casset’s about to discover that maybe being the First Mate on the Phoenix isn’t *everything* there is to life.

The Hill Chargers: I grew up reading every horse-and-a-girl-who-loved-it book I could get my hands on, until my mother decided that I needed to grow up and I started devouring shelf after shelf of my father’s thrillers and detective series. I have long believed that if I write about horses, it will cause me to regress into that teenage girl angst, and I have kept the door closed on all such possibilities. Until now. Because, guess what, I’m a grownup, and I want to write about giant, magic horses. Go with me on this. The Hill Folk are nomadic family groups outside of Verida who breed livestock and wander the grasslands with their huge herds. They are best known, outside of themselves, for being the breeders responsible for the Hill Chargers, gigantic horses of unusual intellect who have a number of unusual characteristics from having been bred in the shadow of the Wolfram Mountains. These stories will actually be about the Hill Folk, but they will focus on some of the most important Hill Chargers alive and how they impact and shape the world around them.

Will it all stop there?

No.

I don’t know if I’ll have additional full-bore series that will come out of Verida (though I wouldn’t bet *against* it), but I do know that there are already two novellas and a prequel… done. There’s lots more, and every time I hang out in Verida, I discover something else that’s worth writing about. The plan on my office wall right now includes no less than twenty-six novels.

I’m on a path. I don’t know where it ends. But I’ve got a pretty good idea it’s going to have been an amazing journey, from everything I’ve gotten to so far.

Go with me on this.

November: 2021 edition

Usually in November I gush about writing energy and the universal value of fiction and then talk about my big plans for the year.

This year will be no exception.

What’s different about this year is how narrow the plan is going to be.

I started out the year with a plan to publish Carbon and get Tell V written.  As usual, Sarah Todd was on the list of series I’d like to revisit, and I was thinking that I might finally get around to publishing some stuff that I just haven’t had the bandwidth to finish out and get covered.  2020 was a disruptive year in a lot of ways, and I was still trying to learn all of the lessons.  I spent a lot of this year doing the same.  I’ve been writing all year, because I never stop writing, and I finished the Surviving Magic academy-years books early in the year.  (I may come back to this series again, but with books that follow the characters through their adventures as adults.)  I finished Tell midyear, and then Verida hit me.

It started with a cover and it started with a character, and it rapidly exploded into a city and then a continent and then a world.  And then another character came to live there, and then another.  I’ve spent the second half of the year writing in Verida, discovering new facets of the city and the culture.  I’m writing rules for card and dice games that they play, and I’m playing footsie with the idea of getting decks of card printed to go with the different series.  I’m all-in on Verida, right now, and I’ve written the first 4-year plan that I had any expectation at all that I would actually stick to.

Usually I work in 4-book sets with big gaps in the middle where I’ll do other things as they seem prudent – follow-up books to existing series, other opportunistic series that occur to me or that I see a specific marketing opportunity to fit them into.

And right now, until something gives me a good hard shake to demonstrate that this is not the path I want to follow, I’m doing one steady set of books in this new world, one 4-book series after another after another, with prequels and novellas and the like in between.  I’m planning on continuing Tell and Carbon for the time being, and my schedule does allow for a 3- or 4-book extension to Surviving Magic, and I’m already out of order for writing the Veridan books, but this is feeling very real and very big.

So this year’s November is different from the ones in the past because I don’t just have a theme for the next year, or a sense of excitement and motivation.

I have a vision of where I’m going and what happens between here and there.

So, I would like to introduce you to the world of Verida and the plan that spans the next four years.

Verida is a human city on the Wolfram River delta.  It has existed there for hundreds of years in a tenuous equilibrium.  It’s a major trading port, and the city is filled with skilled crafsmen and merchants who bring it significant prosperity, but the fae occupants of the broader continent have mixed opinions about the human city.  The stone elves have been trying to wipe Verida off the map for nearly as long as it has been there, and the Veridan army fights an ongoing battle to keep Verida safe and prosperous.

It’s into this world that merchant’s daughter Anastasia comes: a world full of soldiers and guards, merchants and craftsmen, murderers and thieves.  That’s to say nothing of the nomadic horse breeders to the north, nor the pirates patrolling the waters to the south.  Verida is political, it is clever, and it is determined to survive, no matter what the rest of the world intends for it.

Watch this space as I get closer to launching the series and the world.  It’s a world full of elves and pixies and magic, but it’s also full of everything else that characterizes real life: family and friends and duty and opportunity.  Love and hope and an eye to the future.

With a good dollop of luck, my plan is to release Carbon 5 in the first half of 2022 and to have (eight? maybe?) Verida books fill out the rest of the year, potentially starting as early as January.  I have plans for Tell VI that may materialize in the second half of 2022, but that’s going to depend on just how much oxygen Verida leaves my writing and publishing calendar.

I would love to be more specific with a release schedule – I’ve seen other writers who do a really good job of this, and it’s my hope that I might get to the point of being able to do that sometime soon, but for now I’m reminding myself that I need to leave the uncertainty where it exists, because I’d rather not make promises than make them and then break them.  (And I know that I have fallen through on plans in the past.  I’m so sorry for where that has been disappointing.)  I always keep writing.  Always.  But the publishing side of things involves so many moving pieces and so many priorities that sometimes things that shouldn’t take that many hours end up taking multiple weeks – or months – because other priorities end up winning out over and over again.

Maybe that’s just the way of things and I’ll eventually learn that and figure out how to make a solid plan and stick to it anyway.

Maybe I’m still in the highly transitive early stages of figuring out how to get everything done, and I really will turn a corner and make good plans.

And maybe I just like the chaos.

Spoiler: I’m a big fan of chaos.

Happy November, everyone!

NaNo, NaNo!