Chloe Garner's Blog, page 3

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!

A quick note about Sam & Sam

 This series isn’t dead.

I have a Portal Jumpers Adventure novel that I wrote that I need to think again and then think again before I decide it’s worth trying to get it out, and I still have very sincere intentions to write another Sarah Todd one day, but these are weak intentions compared to what is going on with Sam & Sam.

I know as a reader, it’s really frustrating to hit the end of a series and go… but where are the rest?  Even if it’s not because the series left you in a terrible place with a dude hanging off a helicopter over a volcano or whatever, you hit the end of the line with a full measure of momentum and it just chokes you.  And then you see all the other stuff the author is working on and it’s like, well, I guess they don’t love *me* as much as they love *those* readers, and I guess I’m going to go sulk and pout because *my* characters are abandoned.

And, yeah, I’m doing that.

Level truth with y’all: Sam & Sam is a hard series to brand and a hard series to sell.  I still get people reading it, but I think that most of them start with the Surviving Magic series and hit the clue at the end of book three that there’s this whole *other* series over *there* with the same rules and the same world, and they dig it enough to give it a shot.  (Thank you!)  Books like Surviving Magic, Carbon Chronicles, and Tell are a lot easier to put into someone’s hands and say ‘I think this is the kind of thing you’ll like’.  (Don’t get me started on Sarah Todd…  Just… Nope.)  I’m learning a lot about matching the kinds of books that I’m writing to what people already know they’re excited about reading, and while I’m stubborn – y’all, I am *so* stubborn – and I write stuff my own way always, I am trying to build a business that is able to afford a *lot* more of my time.

All that said, though, I’m not done with Sam & Sam.  There are three more books written.  Yes, I know that is *maddening*, because *if they’re written, why aren’t they published!?!*, but getting a draft from finished to publishable takes a lot of hours away from other projects.  I’m still looking for where I can steal those hours away and get my Sam & Sam books done.  Honestly, I plan on it at least twice a year, and then I’ve got something else I need to scoop that time into, instead.

I’m sorry.

This is not a happy answer, like ‘just give me another six months, and I’m going to do another big set of releases!’, although it isn’t impossible that that happens next year.  At some point, I’m going to go trawling through all of the books I have finished and not published and make some firm decisions about just getting them done and out.  But there are a lot of balls in the air all the time, and I need to keep my eye on the ones that buy more of my time.

For now.

But I’ve got three more books written.  I’ve got another book with the Makkai written that runs in parallel to Civil War.  I’ve got another Isobel book, and it *isn’t* completely confusing and non sequitur.  (I know.  I know.  That story was one I had no idea how to tell it, so I went for it.  And I love it.  But *I know*.)  And for Sam & Sam, I still have specific plans.  I have two books out there on the horizon that I’ve been writing toward for some time, now, and I don’t even know how many books between here and there.

Writing Sam & Sam is like coming home.  I go in the door and I know every smell and what’s in every drawer in the kitchen.  I don’t *want* to walk away from that series.  Ever.

I’m there with you, kind of annoyed that everything else gets all the attention and all the love, when I *could* be working on Sam & Sam.

(Don’t get me wrong.  In Verida, there are pirates, and that is something I am so hungry to write I can taste it.  I know the instant I let a character set foot in the artists’ colony, it’s going to spawn its own series.  There’s nothing I write because I’ve got a theory it’ll sell.  I love every world I get the opportunity to go live in.)

But Sam & Sam is formative for me.  And it’s going to take a very big shift of perspective for me to decide that I’m well and truly done exploring there.

Thanks for taking the ride with me, thank you for giving me a shot at painting worlds, and thank you for being annoyed.

Many happy returns.

Conversations with the Past

 I lost some words last night to a save glitch, and I’m still too angry to write new fiction, just now, so I’m going to take a little bit of time and write a blog post I’ve been sitting on for a bit.

It doesn’t take a particular awareness of the world around us to recognize that there is a lot of weird going on, right now.  The world that we’re going forward into might not look like the one we came out of.  Normally that happens gradually enough that you don’t really notice it until you find the stack of VCRs out in the garage that you’d planned on getting working again and now… they literally have no value at all.  Right now it feels like that change is happening all at once, and I find myself frequently troubled by it.  That isn’t the frame I’d had in mind for this blog, but that’s where my mind is, tonight, so that’s how we’re doing this.

There are certain members of this household for whom ‘Glowing Eyes’ is presently their favorite song.  I’ll post the YouTube of it here shortly, but this is old-school Twenty-One Pilots, and it’s charming and insightful and entirely on-brand, but listening to it a few weeks ago, I found that there were things that I wanted to tell Tyler Joseph in response.  Not his today self.  His then-self.  Simply that a woman this many years later would be sitting and *experiencing* that music, not just as background noise and entertainment, but as an honest-to-goodness conversation about the known-unknown and the unknown-unknown.  That his words have meaning and value and impact, this far down the road from when he wrote them.

Because I think that kid deserves to know that.

I feel like I can watch him grow up and evolve through the perspectives in his music, and there are points along the way, constantly along the way, when I want to answer him.  It’s clearly one half of a conversation.  My voice goes in as the other half.  How is that not obvious?

And I realized, perhaps not for the first time but in a new *way*, that that’s what art is.  Art is the present talking to the future.

And the future can’t answer back, at least not into the past. Only into its own future.

I write books.

Some of them are quite silly.

Some of them are more or less worthy than others.

But they have the capacity to pick up that conversation with someone ten, twenty, a hundred years into the future.  People I will never meet, whose names I will never know, and whose stories I will never get to hear.  Sometimes I like to imagine them, not in their masses, but as an individual here or there.  I don’t know how they feel.  Being the writer of a story gives me an entirely different *feeling* as I’m working through plot, even as a pantser who doesn’t know what’s going to happen.  Someone told me how *emotional* a scene was to them in one of my books and I boggled at it.  It was intense, but to respond to that moment with emotion was… not what I did.  I’m learning how different it is to experience a work from the creative side as opposed to the consumption side, and I don’t pretend to imagine what a reader might feel, through most of the span of a book.  But I wonder about it.  I hope.  I hope that it has something to say that’s useful to them, that makes them feel safe or validated or emboldened or challenged or seen or… connected.

When I distill what it is to be human, what humans *want*, when you get past the things that are about physical survival, I think that what people want – what I want – is to know and be known.

And everyone can only exist in the instant that is right now.  You remember the past and you are shaped by it, but your existence is constrained.

Art has the ability to transcend that, to speak in a (maybe imperfect?) half of a conversation with the future.

And that’s more than just a little bit of magic.

Hello from the past.

I may not know you, but I see you and you matter.  These words are my proof.

Carbon Chronicles

This year, man. I mean, I know it’s obvious and redundant to even say it out loud, but this year has been a beast, and it trashed all of my cheery-faced plans from early in the year. I’d hoped to have Carbon Chronicles out much earlier this year, but the hurdles of life meant that I couldn’t finish the last book anywhere near as fast as I thought I would, and one of my contracts with myself is that I’ll have all of the opening books to a series done before I post the first one, so even if I never go back and write more books in that series, there’s a satisfying collection to go experience. Goal: zero orphans.

What that has meant in practice this year is that a series that I thought would come out in June or July, whose first book was actually in readers’ hands through a group sale in May, this series is not launching until… now. December.

Sigh.

I could write a short story explaining the trials that this series went through to make it here, but… that’s not organic to anything about it. So. Bygones.

And… onward.

The Flight of the Kingfisher is the first of four books that I’ll be releasing every few weeks from now until I get through them. (As of today, they’re all available on preorder, so the dates are fixed; I’m just not all that fussed about them.) This is a space opera, technically. I think. The words have a mushy definition that have a *fascinating* history if you’re really wonky about the evolution of science fiction and fantasy subgenres. More broadly, Carbon et all are in the midst of a space adventure. Smuggling, double-crosses, intragalactic politics and subterfuge, hidden planets, aliens… checkmark to all of them. If that’s your thing, especially when you mix them with a strong, mysterious female lead, this might be worth a look.

You can find The Flight of the Kingfisher here. Happy reading!

Novembering 2020

 I traditionally do a November update with the highly-optimistic goals and ideas for the upcoming year, but this year has trashed my publishing schedule for a lot of reasons, and I’m not ready to make predictions of what I’m going to be able to pull off next year.

This should not be taken as bad news, though, because – as I always say – I may not be publishing, but I’m always writing.

First, a bit of background to those who haven’t read a November update before.

November. Is. Magic.

I have spent the month of November every year for the last – checks – eight years (this will be my ninth NaNo) participating in a wild writing event full of highly-motivated, highly-caffeinated writers where the goal is to write 50k words in a month.  I know most readers don’t even *try* to think in terms of wordcount – it’s an author metric – so let me clarify that this is a perfectly appropriate novel length, for a short, tight novel.  Most of the books you’re reading are probably about 50% longer than that, unless you’re reading *my* stuff, which is more like twice that long.  Unless you most recently read Sarah Todd or Portal Jumpers which are three times as long.

I’m wordy.

Moving on.

This high-energy event is something that I spend my entire year sort of planning around and ramping up for, because I always want to hit it with a fresh sense of enthusiasm.  It is the high holiday of my writing calendar, and Nov1 is sort of a Jan1 for me.  I sit down with a bowl of leftover (or stolen) candy and I write long into the night after midnight.  It feels good.

Coincidentally, this year, I came out some other personal clouds through the end of October, and I have hit November HARD.  Like, on track for my best year ever.  (No pressure, or anything…)

So, I’m not publishing because I’m still trying to keep enough other plates spinning, but I’m CLOSE, but I also wanted to put a flag up for you guys to let you know that when I finally get the publishing machine running again, there’s a kind of SERIOUS backlog of books that are going to be ready to go.

I am hoping to start the release of the Carbon Chronicles in December, maybe the very end of November.  Watch for a newsletter on that very soon.  Meanwhile, I am TEARING through the next three books of School of Magic Survival, and they should be ready to go sometime in late Q1 2021 or early Q2 2021.  I’m planning on one book of Carbon Chronicles coming out each month after the first one launches, and I’m hoping that the Survival School books will start up the month after that for three books.  I am hoping to get to another Tell book yet this year (showing my optimism) which would probably launch immediately after Survival School, if I can get all the pieces to line up, and then beyond that, I’m going to be paying attention to reader demand on Carbon, Tell, and Survival School to try to keep what I’m working on in line with what people are most excited about reading.

That and I never rule out starting a new series.  I have a shifter series in mind that won’t leave me alone.  Just have to figure out the framing and it’s gonna push its way in line when I’m least prepared for it.  This is how I work.

So.

November is happening.  2020 failed to call it off.  Bazinga.

Books are coming.

Lots of them.

We get knocked down, but we get up again.

I have an instinct that this is where an authentic, sincere benediction goes, and – believe me – I am feeling them.  Stuff is rough, and I’m overwhelmed by the passion I’m wrestling with daily for how important it all is.  It IS important, and casual dismissiveness is completely wrong.  So, carefully, and doing my best to avoid dismissiveness, I’m going to say that in the midst of enormously important *stuff*, *I* need a place where other things can be light and enthusiastic and optimistic, and if you’ll permit me, I’m going to keep that space here.

Here’s to new worlds, new adventures, places where the good people are going to win and where the future is going to be better.

Happy November.

The Ups, the Downs, and the Sideways (OR… I’m not lazy, I swear!)

It has been…

Y’all know. Wherever you’re from, wherever you’ve been, if you have access to digital media (hello, from across the internet!) you know that the past season of life has been disruptive and destructive in almost every way measurable. I hope that you have found the mechanisms that protect your mind, your body, and your relationships as best as possible. I’ve been working hard at that, and let me affirm that it don’t come cheap.

I had hoped to have a new series that started coming out in June since, yanno, I had the first book done and published in a private sale in May. I was working on the rest of the books and I had up a good head of steam to get them done, polished, and ready for sale at the same one-a-month rate that I did with Tell. It was a beautiful plan.

I underestimated a lot of things. You guys remember all of the ‘I’ve been training for this my entire life’ memes that the introverts were putting out in April and May? Yeah. I felt that way through about the halfway point of June, and then some stuff went sideways on me and the world didn’t work right any more.

Still doesn’t, actually.

So. I work by myself in an office in my house. Have done for years. There are distractions and there is the particularly personal difficulty of trying to have audio conversations with people whose mouths I can’t see moving (I learned decades ago that I lip read despite having perfectly functional ears, because my eyes process language so much better than my ears do), but I got a lot of stuff done. A lot of stuff. Good stuff.

And then I couldn’t focus. I would have four different things open that I was trying to do, and I wouldn’t be able to do any of them for long enough to actually make progress on them. I was forever trying to catch up on what I’d done just before, and then I’d get distracted to another task. For someone who sets very regimented, numerical goals, it has been maddening. Around-about late April, early May, I came to the firm understanding that *stuff was different*, and I took my foot off the gas.

(Just want to break in here and say – as far as I can tell, the constant sense of distraction and inability to get things done is very common. *Stuff is hard* y’all, and not because it used to be that hard.)

I’ve been working all summer. I’m still making progress at the space adventure series I wanted to launch in June. And I’m close. Like, Painfully and Maddeningly close. I’m working up to covers that I’ll put up reveals on as soon as I have them, and at some point I’m going to ask myself if the reason they aren’t done is because they don’t *have* to be done yet, and just push the button.

Because you guys are here. And those of you who bought from the private sale in May have signaled that you would very much like the next books, thankyouverymuch. And this is what I do. I write the books. I finish the books. I get the books to you.

Life got weird and hard and complicated in some pretty universal ways (and there have been some very personal tectonic shifts as well that won’t show up on my site except perhaps very tangentially), and it slowed me down. I’m sorry. Genuinely. I feel like a first book is a contract with my readers, and I have not made good on it like I wanted to.

I just wanted to let you know that I’m still here, I’m still putting in the words, that I haven’t forgotten, and that I appreciate all y’all for being a big part of the light at the end of the tunnel for me. We aren’t there, yet, out at the end of that tunnel, but I know it’s ahead of us, and I know you guys are going to be there.

Ups, downs, and sidewayses notwithstanding.

It’s All Art

So. I have a fascinating new thing.

It is my nature to go deep down rabbit holes when I find one, often actors, sometimes musicians, and I go and watch videos and interviews, read coverage going back years or decades, and return to favorite content over and over again. It energizes me and inspires me in different ways, depending on the relationship that the individual has with art and creativity, but it’s the sort of thing that leads to a set of music videos or albums that sets the soundtrack to multiple novels.

I don’t often write about it, because there are much less fairweather fans in the world who can legitimately crow about the talents of their favorite performers, but I’m deep into this one and spending more and more time thinking about the relationships among the arts.

I’m not exactly a newcomer to Twenty-One Pilots – I actually have a full novel that was inspired by one of their songs a while back – but I have been a superficial consumer for a long time. Level of Concern, though, has changed things. It hit me at a moment, the way I suspect it has an enormous number of other people, given the way it has taken off, and it catalyzed an interest that has followed very traditional paths. I’m going through their albums and listening to them front to back on loop. I’m watching interviews and live concert footage. I’m reading articles. I can’t issue guarantees on such things, but I expect that Blurryface and Trench will be the nearly-exclusive soundtrack for at least two or three novels.

Let me first drop the Level of Concern video here, because… worthy.

Tyler Joseph is… astonishing to me. Familiar. A mind that sees mine.

I know that that’s what art *is*, but it still always blows me away when it happens. It doesn’t get old. Art is capturing the way the world feels and the way the world is at an essential level, expressing existence, and – in my opinion – if it is done right, it’s something that is awakening to other people as they relate to it.

And I’m late to the party. These guys have got a die-hard following, and I love that. I know that I am *not* that. I am something else. A fairweather fan chasing the next new high, my next fascinating new thing. I’ll get their next album. And the one after that. I’m a *loyal* fan to my fascinating things. I watch all their movies, all their shows, listen to all their music, watch their videos. But I’m not a core fan. I get that. I’m okay with that.

But it doesn’t change how intensely involved I am with this art *right now*.

With the idea of the mind who set it out.

The world is often dark, fighting with shadows, never knowing which ones are incorporeal and which ones are going to push you underwater, and some days all you’re doing is trying to crawl out of the tar. Other days you make a better showing. Geez, that hits me all the way at my core.

But my intent isn’t to fangirl over Mr. Joseph’s intensely personal art.

What I’ve also been thinking about is how much I identify with him as an artist.

About the way having people react to your work is so core to the reward of creating art. About the ongoing desire to pick up new skills and expand existing ones when you have the opportunity. About the constant switching back and forth between artist mode and executive mode and how expensive that transition is. About how terrifying it is to tie your identity to your art. About the difference between putting your head down and creating something and the way the professional industry picks a date on a calendar *way out there* and says that that’s when it’s going to be done.

I find the process of creating music – and film – very interesting compared to that of creating prose, because of the collaborative nature of music and film compared to the extremely isolated process of writing. There is also the distinction between the recording arts – creating a fixed product for consumption – and the performing arts – a live act of artistic creation for the audience, and how music and acting have their own flavors of both recording and performing art, whereas writing… The idea of doing in-person signings is a someday-maybe goal, but that hardly counts as performing. Some authors do live or recorded readings, but that’s such a distinctly *different* skill from writing. I find myself mildly jealous of performing artists, because of the feedback they get in a live setting, while I’m simultaneously *absolutely certain* that if the *risks* of live performance were a part of the natural art of writing, I would *not* be a writer. I hate traveling and I hate… well, risk. Playing to an empty theater or a dead crowd? The idea makes me feel physically ill, and I am so grateful that my medium is a keyboard and I work wherever and whenever I choose.

All of us are telling stories, though. Capturing the way the world looks and feels to us, and then discovering that there are people out there who have had shades of the same experience. Knowing and being known. This is what I want out of art and this is what I want as an artist.

Level of Control was a song written for a moment. Tyler talks about not overthinking it, about finding a way to put out the art in the moment that it fits, and it just resonates with my process, particularly with the idealized version of how I *want* to be a writer. Don’t overthink it. Create the product that feels the way it’s supposed to, and then let it out into the world and move forward.

There’s a track on Blurryface that I play over and over, because it’s so familiar to me as an artist. Lane Boy is about doing the art you want to do – that it’s *in* you to do – and completely disregarding the industry guidelines on how to be successful. Fairly Local has echoes of the same thing. The songs that play on the radio are the ones that pave your success as a musician in much the same way that writing within a big, defined genre and hitting all the tropes right is the most reliable way to find success as a writer. (Or hitting publisher tastes; an experiment I’ve avoided thoroughly enough to not be able to speak about it at all.) But there is a private success to creating things that represent the diversity of your own existence, of your own taste and your own culture, and I am just *digging* that right now. I’m inspired by the defiance of it, and the way it suggests that maybe creating everything rather than just commercially successful things is a part of artistic success.

I’ve seen – heck, I’ve *written* – commentary that says that the only real ruler for the quality and success of writing is the revenue it generates. Everything else is just opinion. Aaaaand… Objectively, everything else *is* just opinion. But there’s a counterweight to that. I’ve met authors making six figures a year. I’ve listened to authors who make seven figures a year. I know of authors making eight figures a year. But they don’t have the career I want. (And they work awfully hard at a lot of things that aren’t writing.) I’m okay going where I want to, writing what I want to, and picking up fans along the way who are just as excited as I am with the new right-hand turn.

Space Opera, anyone? Coming soon…

Not all of my readers are going to be enthusiastic about everything I write. An awful lot of them are only going to only be enthusiastic about the one thing I wrote. That’s cool. I get it. I have authors – and actors and musicians – where I really only have one series that I’m into and it isn’t the artist’s voice that draws me in so much as the details of the piece.

No hard feelings, no harm done.

But I can create what I want, I can try *anything* I want, I can collaborate with anyone I want, I can create the thing that I want it to be and let it go, and hopefully along the way I can create a body of work that my readers are going to find is a rich selection of options where they can find art that captures things about the world that are personal to them. To see and be seen, to know and be known.

Art.

Tyler Joseph.

Twenty-One Pilots.

Fascinating New Thing.

Tell, the Detective

[image error]Right.

I want to get this out in front: the name of this series and the books in the series were…  Well, they were my idea.  But.  They weren’t my *first* idea.  I wanted to call them ‘Things that Lurk in Darkness’ and ‘Things that Plot in Darkness’ and ‘Things that Come Out of the Darkness’ and like that, but Tell is the name of one of the main characters – the detective, as you might have worked out – and I said *off-handedly*, “Well, I could do, you know, like ‘Tell Me a Secret’ and ‘Tell Me No Lies’ and like that…” and everyone who knew anything about this series pounced.

It’s better.

It is.

It is *exactly* what a paranormal detective series should be, especially one with the tone of the series I wrote.

It’s a bit catty and a bit playful and it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and…  Yeah.  It’s the right branding.  I just really liked my ‘Things that Lurk in Darkness’ bit, so…  Whatever.

That said.  I really love this series.  It *is* catty and playful, and while it takes things seriously that it needs to take seriously – life and death *matters*, and the characters care about each other – it has a sense of teasing and humor that I wasn’t sure I could carry off across all four books, after I finished the first one.

Now that’s an ‘oh, no’ moment.  Looking back at the first book, I didn’t know if I could do it again.

But the series is good.  The third and fourth books are actually my favorites, and it’s structured in such a way that I don’t see any reason that I couldn’t come back to it whenever I wanted to and just continue it on.

That’s one of the fun parts of doing something that’s set up like a traditional private investigator series.  Every book has its own mystery to solve, and while there are a whole bunch of other arcs going on – characters are always off doing the things that matter to them, after all – there’s no main villain that, once he’s gone, the books naturally end.  There’s always another mystery.

And it’s *fun*.

I love my books.  I genuinely do.  I go back and read them – almost every single one of them – and I am *entertained* by them.  But Tell is *fun*, and that’s different.  And not all of my books are fun.

Well, okay.  I *do* cackle at the sound of zombies chewing.  So even some of my darker work is still *fun*.  It’s just not lighthearted like Tell has the capacity to be.

Don’t let me misdirect: bad things happen in this series, and the characters care about them.  There is violence.  There is gore.  But there is also eating cereal directly out of the box and shoes that are terrible for running in and a bar where the bartenders dye their skin to match the ever-changing decor.

There’s a genie and a werewolf and a banshee.  And then some other guys that I flat-out made up.  Death cults, ancient vampires, a witch who reads palms.

And secrets.

There are so many secrets.

My editing pass on this series has been really challenging, because I always end up settled in, low in my chair, just reading the story.  I love these characters, I love the tone, and I love the stories that I get to tell in this series.

Tell Me a Secret comes out March 5th, and Tell It Like It Is is on preorder, set to launch two weeks after that.  Show and Tell and Time Will Tell will be coming up for preorder in the next day or so, and they’ll be releasing at a 2-3 week spacing after that.

[image error]

This has been a *total* blast to write.  My writing plans for the year are mostly firm, with a sci-fi space adventure and *probably* another Sarah Todd book, but if you get to the end of Time Will Tell and you’re desperate for more, let me know.  Half the fun of being an indie author is that I get to make things up as I go along, in every possible context.

 

Happy reading, y’all!

On Series

So.

Series.

I mostly write in series, because that’s how I like my fiction.  Open-ended and ongoing.  It’s always… sad, when a favorite TV show or a series of novels works its way to a natural close, because I know that I won’t get to live in that world again, or if I do, it’ll be because an unexpected demand drafted the creators into making more content that they had no plan for – often the worse outcome.  I don’t have any issue with creators who decide they want to end a series, and I can think of several who did a remarkable job at it, but my preference is for worlds that are a bit more realistic in that, after the final word in the book, those characters still exist, the things that they have struggled against still exist (I write non-romance novels; this is a *huge* difference between romance and non-romance, because romance really does have the potential for an HEA), and their willingness to engage with those conflicts is presumably still there.  Even if a cast of characters manages to permanently defeat a specific antagonist (yay!), the world – or universe – is still teeming with people – or non-people – who will jump at the opportunity to lay claim to power.  Evil still exists, even after the villain is dead.

So, yeah, my series don’t have an ending, any more than they (mostly) have chapters.  I don’t get why books want or need them.  They need a conclusion to the conflict arc (sorry about how that worked out in the first four books of Sam & Sam – it really is more like a huge story broken into four parts…  live and learn.) but they don’t have to be *done* at ‘the end’.  I always have loose threads, characters who have incomplete agendas, and room for the main cast to continue to evolve.  I love that about the worlds that I write.

Someone referred to the end of my School of Magic Survival series as a slip-knot, in a review.  I have *no* idea if she considers that a good thing or a bad thing (someone clue me in, in the comments?) and I’m not 100% sure what it means, as a technical term assessing the series, but what it *feels* like is that she’s noting that the series *ended*, but it isn’t tied off in a firm knot.  I could write another book in that series if I wanted to, or if I needed to in order to service plot going on elsewhere in that universe.  I know that other authors may make different decisions, but that’s how I prefer to leave my stories.  Ready for the next fight.

That said, I do try very hard to write a complete ‘origin’ story.  In order for my readers to get introduced to a world, there must be a sequence of exploring that world, which I usually do through the eyes of an uninitiated character of some kind.  That character needs to discover the world, needs to fight to secure a place in that world, and then must demonstrate how he or she works in the context of that world.  In many cases, there’s another element where the character is fighting against the world that he finds himself in.  It’s not a universal structure for action/adventure plots, but it’s pretty common, and for me it is central (not a rule, but a guideline) on how to fit a world to a character and create a system out of a universe that is capable of fighting off the bad guy, whatever form he may take.  From there, anything is possible, and what I’ve effectively done is create a playground where I can build anything I want.  It’s great fun, but getting to that moment, where the MC flexes the world around them and understands their role in it at some meaningful level, I try really hard to get my series to that point as quickly as possible (in the calendar sense) so that I don’t leave readers waiting on the completion of this really important milestone.

After that?  The series can be *done*, if I never come back to it.  That’s okay.

I can come back to it much later because I’ve had an idea I can’t shake or because the character starts inserting herself into other series completely without warning.

Or I can come back because readers can’t stand that a series is done and they must have more.

There are very few series that I’ve written where I don’t have some idea where I would go next, with them.

So.

If you want another book?  Have a favorite character?

Speak up.  I’m listening.

The Helpless Blog of BSB Concert-going

I have a personal connection to one of the members of the Backstreet Boys. It’s not deep or significant or meaningful. I have never met any of them and I am never likely to. But. It goes back a long, long way.

I grew up in the same city, in the same region of the city, as one of the boys, and I was in high school when they were huge. Because of the hometown connection, BSB was a religion at my high school. N*SYNC was a blasphemy, and I did not actually listen to one of their albums until I was in college out of a sense of loyalty. I loved the Boys as individuals, and I loved their music.

I was deeply ashamed of this.

Because it was so… transparent. It was manufactured and they were simply performing it, and it often made no sense. It was so popular. I have spent a good deal of my life avoiding the popular, because if it is that broadly popular, it usually lacks distinctiveness. If everyone likes it, there’s usually not all that much to like. And because it was uncool. Backstreet nation is real, y’all. I know this. And they are passionate. But even at a high school where it was mandatory to love BSB, I felt like the really cool kids avoided talking about it openly. It wasn’t the cool music. (Don’t ask me what the cool music was at the time. I’ve never been the one to know.)

So.

The Millennium tour came and went and I did not go see it.

I regret that to this day.

It was epic, and I would have been so giddy to see it, and I did not because I didn’t want to admit to people (which? who cares; I was a teenage girl, and I was convinced they all had opinions on everything I did) that I wanted to go. And tickets were expensive. Like a hundred dollars and stuff.

I let money and perception stop me from doing something that would have been…

What, though?

What is a concert?

I’ve been struggling with that, and I’ll come back to it, because my anecdote isn’t done yet.

Fast-forward a dozen years and a few.

Linkin Park, Maroon 5, Fun., Coldplay, OkGo, Kongos, AMK. I have playlists that I’ve been writing to for years, now, full of good music. I’ve written entire novels to AMK, to Coldplay, to Kongos. And then I hear Nick Carter’s voice on the radio.

I can pick that voice out of any background noise.

Because I knew it like my own voice at 18 years old, and you don’t forget the things that made you who you were when you were 18.

And it all comes back.

This huge reservoir of passion about this group, this music, these voices, these men.

And JJ bought me all of the intervening CDs (because I want music I can touch, and rip and upload to my streaming app du jour, because jeez they die out fast), one per week for a month, and I devoured them.

De-voured.

And Never Gone, Unbreakable, This is Us, and In a World Like This became the soundtrack to my writing. For months. And months. And months.

I have a hard time counting how many novels I have written to this collection of albums, when you include the DNA album that came out in the middle of the rest of the story, but suffice to say it is significant. I am home, with this music. It is everything that I loved about them when I was a teenager without being transparently manufactured in the same way. They grew up, and they grew up at the same time that I did, in the same culture. It is hardly remarkable that they should have grown in so many of the same ways that I did.

It makes me So Happy.

And more than that.

It makes me feel.

Everything.

There are songs on these albums that have kept me writing when I have wanted to quit and unpublish everything and go hide in a cave in Minecraft.

No kidding. It’s a thing that comes at me four or five times a year, and Show ‘Em What Your Made Of is so much a part of how I soldier through to the end of the fit and can keep moving forward with my writing again.

So.

There’s another thing going on in my life around this time that I don’t talk about publicly. It’s a part of my private life – my deep private life – and it isn’t a part of my life as an author. But. It is a chronic thing, and it is a thing that relates to someone who is a dependent to me. And it was emptying me out.

Constant ongoing maintenance, no hope for improvement, failure. I felt like my life was constantly out of my control.

What had been a deep reservoir of personal strength – I perceive myself to be a strong person in many ways – was emptying and emptying and then it was gone and I was a shell that had a tendency to crumble when people bumped into me the wrong way or when things didn’t go right, because there was nothing underneath this facade that I maintained just to keep going every day.

My battery on my laptop died and I lost it, one day. Exhausted, end-of-self lost it. And JJ told me if I needed professional help, I was allowed to get it.

I love him.

It was the permission I needed.

Just not for the thing he said.

I called a friend and begged her to go to Las Vegas with me and see the Backstreet Boys perform live. Standing-room tickets right up there against the stage… they weren’t that expensive, and I needed to get out. To go be someplace where no one was depending on me, and where I could just be a part of a thing that was nothing but joy and amazement and art.

So my friend went, on seriously like two days’ notice, and we walked around Las Vegas and we ate and we talked. We literally did nothing else. And we went to the concert.

That concert saved my life.

That trip saved my life, but the concert was an accessory to it.

No kidding.

I don’t think I was on a path to suicide. I’m too stubborn for that. But my life was gone. And that trip was what it took to give me a chance to breathe and recover and come back and to be.

Breathe.

The show, though.

The show was incredible.

Five men performing music that I know. I know their parts, I know their words, I know their sounds. Five men who are a part of something. Together. Which is, unto itself, incredible to me. They know each other, they know their music, they know what to expect from each other and how they move. Five personalities that – at least from an outsider and a fan perspective – are familiar to me.

And, dude, they were right there. People.

Real live people-people with facial expressions and humor and sweat.

Oh, the sweat.

Yes.

I went home and got in touch with several other women who were willing to be manipulated into going back with me, and I put together a second trip a few months later.

I was a different person, I was there with different people, the trip had an entirely different purpose, but the show.

It was different and the same and marvelous for both.

Marvelous.

DNA – the latest and best of their albums – came out between the two shows that I went to in Vegas.

I often write to just that album. I will do so tonight, once I get myself calmed down enough to write fiction again.

But my story isn’t done yet.

I came home once more, high on the concert, still trying to figure out what it is, and unwilling to accept that that was the last time. I talked my first friend into going to a show when they went on tour, and then one of the second group of friends expressed remorse that she hadn’t jumped on going to see the tour show with us, so I found

[image error]This is the seat that I paid for and never touched.  I stood and danced the entire concert.

another one that I wanted to go to.

For those keeping score at home, as of tonight, I have seen four BSB shows in the last year.

Making up for lost time.

(The Boys are in a marvelous state of economy where they have an enormous fan base who are all coming into the phase of life where they have money. Long may BSB reign.)

Every one of the shows has been different.

Every single time, I come out of the show deeply wishing that I could sit and talk to Nick Carter about art.

(They’re indie, these days. They have art of music and vocals and performance, and then they have business and fan engagement, and one of the very coolest things about the BSB brand is their fan engagement. I take notes every time I see them doing something new and different, and I am very much not kidding about this.)

[image error]These are my gloves and my rings.  I bought them in college and they have gone through move after move waiting for their moment.

I missed Millennium, and I can’t take that back, but I wonder if DNA hasn’t been more satisfying, anyway. I was eighteen and would have hopped up and down and screamed a lot, but now I marvel at the technique of performance and pacing and structure, about relationship and engagement and endurance. Music and writing share an awful lot of ground.

Four shows.

I try my level best to keep my phone in my back pocket and not spend the entire time taking video and pictures, because (a) they are awful pictures in that lighting and (b) it takes me out of just being there.

Maybe.

Maybe part of the magic of the thing is the being there. Because I am an introvert. I took a test (you know the ones – the real ones that someone paid for you to take, that mostly read like a horoscope when you’re done) and it told me that I’m kind of a remarkable introvert, for just how introverted I am. Being in a group of people costs me energy, costs me self. And there is an enormous gift that these shows give me in that I am a part of something that big, without it costing me anything, personally. I can participate in that place and that moment and with those people, and it is easy.

I like being a part of the ocean instead of standing up on the rocks.

It’s not just entertainment. It would be so easy to just write it off as a potent form of entertainment, but it is not.

[image error]This is my full collection of accessories.  I played so hard.

It is a language. Music and performance entwined together like that, and for the Boys, it is a fluent language. They’re emphasizing at the shows, just now, that they’ve been doing this for twenty-six years. They have been working on this performance language – together – for more years of their lives than they haven’t.

One of the amazing gifts of art is the ability to tell you things that aren’t there in words. To make you feel things. To make you understand things in a new way.

This.

Is.

Art.

Oh, how I want to sit and talk to Nick Carter about art.

It’s not weighty, self-aware art, nor is it trying to make a statement about the human condition.

But it feels. Joy and hunger and loss and play.

[image error]The show, the final set of tickets.  They aren’t standing-room off to the side of the stage (I’m still price-sensitive), but it was a great view of the show.

The concert itself has an arc, and… I quietly wish I had one more time to observe it, because I know I would learn from it.

But.

Tonight was the last.

One, because JJ would… I honestly have no idea what he would do if I told him I wanted to pick up one more show before the tour ended. Partially because there are only a couple more to pick from unless I’m willing to chase them internationally, but mostly because I’ve already done four, and every one of them I’ve talked about being a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Two, because it was a really nice, natural ending to this moment.

Tonight they came home.

It felt like home.

It was good.

The tour is wrapping up. Nick’s wife is like eight and rather-large-change months pregnant, and they need to be done for him to get back to her and being a dad. You could feel the senioritis at the show tonight, the extra cutting up, the laughing, the ease of it. They’re all but done, and they know it.

BSB is back. Maybe it’s not they who are back, but me – it’s hard to tell.

But they’ve put on an enormous tour with a show that was exquisite. (Better than Las Vegas. If you ask me.) It did everything right.

I feel like they haven’t put a foot wrong the entire time I’ve been watching, and… if I could learn just a fraction of the wisdom that they put to work…

They’re happy.

And they deserve to be.

And that was how I’m going to finish this sequence of concerts. On the one out at the end of the tour where they are happy and pleased and home.

It is a good end.

But I’m home and it’s three in the morning and I don’t want to let go of the buzz.

Which is why my blog tonight is helpless.

Someone suggested on Facebook – the land of the infinite speculative conjecture – that this is probably going to be their last tour.

(See marvelous fan base with $$$… Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I think BSB nation is energetic enough to keep them going a while longer.)

If it was the last time I see them perform live, I feel like I have lost something.

And that is strange.

Because it’s something I wouldn’t have ever missed, a year ago.

Going to see someone sing something live instead of sitting on my couch and getting some writing done while I listen to it… I prefer to watch my sports on TV because I get the commentary and the instant replays. I prefer to listen to my music at home because I can multi-task and the drinks are cheaper.

It shocks me how much these concerts have meant to me.

The asymmetry of the relationship with the Boys – I know them, at least as far as their performing facades and their voices go – and they will never know me. More. I am one of literally a million fans who turned out to see their performances. I am an infinitesimal part of their experience. Like the guy I pass in the aisle at the grocery store. Like the guy I pass on the next aisle over at the grocery store.

They are profound and meaningful to me as performers and as artists.

And they are people.

(Which is just all kinds of strange. They are concepts. How can concepts have children? And sweat? The mind boggles.)

The asymmetry and duality of it bothers me. It is a cognitive dissonance that I will hold until I sleep, and then I will release them from their very imminent significance, and the tension of that cognitive dissonance will fade and I will return to being human again.

I texted a friend after the first tour concert that I have to re-learn how to be human after a night like this.

Because for a time I was something else.

I was an ocean.

Helpless and powerful and moved.

Tomorrow I will reflect on what I can learn from that, as a writer.

Tonight?

Tonight I will bask in fingerless gloves and music that I know every single sound of, dancing my face off and everything that made me feel when I was eighteen years old and the world was marvelous and terrifying.