J.S. Bailey's Blog
June 24, 2022
Upon a Waking Dream: A Preview!
In case you haven't heard, I'm Kickstarting a new short story collection soon! How do you like the cover?
Upon a Waking Dream is a collection of 12 science fiction and fantasy stories...and you can read one of them right here. Keep scrolling!
Day 1
Greetings, daily log! Wow, it’s fun talking into this thing—I don’t even have to type! Good thing, because I’m all butterfingers on a keyboard. Right, right…okay. My name is Kwame Pattison, not that I’m important. Porter and I arrived at Outpost #602 on ...
June 23, 2022
What a crazy year and a half it's been...
What a crazy year and a half it's been.
I used to throw everything I had in me into my writing career. I churned out 1,000 words a day, did book signings every weekend, and trekked to far-off lands with magical names like "Minnesota" to peddle my books at comic cons.
At the beginning of 2021, I ran my first-ever Kickstarter campaign and was happily plunging into the first draft of Dalton Kane Book 2 when my mental health took a complete nosedive. I felt like I was losing my mind and didn't know w...
February 6, 2021
Dalton Kane and the Greens: A Preview
Hey there, folks! It's been a long time since I've posted anything here!
In case you've missed the news, my next novel, Dalton Kane and the Greens, is due to be out this August! It's a big departure from my previous work, and I had a lot of fun writing it, so I hope you all have a lot of fun reading it.
Here's a quick blurb:
When humankind first settled Molorthia Six a hundred years ago, they thought it was uninhabited. It turns out that the treelike Greens were just holding very still--and that th...
December 2, 2019
Thanks and Rest
2019 has been one heck of a year. It's certainly been my busiest year, and for these past few weeks, I've been taking a much-needed rest by hardly writing, painting the walls at the bookstore where I work, hardly writing, washing out paint rollers, hardly writing, wishing the paint specks washed off of my hands easier, and hardly writing.
But don't worry! I may not be writing much at the moment, and my event schedule has been a bit empty, but for everything there is a season. I'll be writing...
September 12, 2019
Preorder Solemnity Today!
You may have noticed it has been a long time since I've released a novel.
Being an author involves an extraordinary amount of patience. We wait weeks to see what our editors say. We wait months--or longer!--for our publishers to package up our books in nice little bows and send them out into the world to be enjoyed. (Okay, maybe there aren't any bows involved. I *am* an author; and we tend to make things up by our very natures.)
Luckily, fans of The Chronicles of Servitude will only have t...
July 12, 2019
Harry Potter, Good Omens, and The Power of Allegory
I was ten years old when I first heard of Harry Potter.
Prisoner of Azkaban had just come out, and there was an article about the books' success in our Weekly Reader at school. It seemed like their popularity exploded outward from that moment, and soon it seemed that nearly everyone at my private Catholic school was reading them.
I received all three novels for Christmas that year and quickly gobbled them up. Soon after, I began to hear some concerns from parents about the "witchcraft" inv...
June 26, 2019
On Social Awkwardness
I was a grown adult at this point in time. I was amazed at their perceptiveness, and unsure of exactly what I'd done that warranted their comment. They were right, though.
I am socially awkward.
And I always have been.
(Yours Truly, circa 2003. My posture is making my eyes twitch.)Different people probably have differing definitions of what it means to be socially awkwa...
March 26, 2019
Thirty: A Reflection
Boy, has it been a looong time since I posted anything here. Over a year! Oh, my poor, neglected blog!
But hey, I've been busy. Like, really, REALLY busy. I've written oodles of short stories, had one accepted into an anthology, finished writing one novel, started writing another one, sent that second one off to my editor, and had roughly five bajillion author events so new readers can enjoy my books.
It's been fun!
Want to know what else is fun? On Thursday, March 28, I t...
February 21, 2018
Introducing the UK-Only Audiobook Giveaway
If you've been tuning into this blog over the past year, you may have spotted some of my earlier audiobook giveaways. These giveaways were open to residents of the US and UK, yet all of the winners resided in the US! I feel like I'm a fair person, so this time I'm giving away free audiobook copies of Servant, Sacrifice, and Ordinary Souls to TWO lucky winners who reside in the the United Kingdom ONLY.
To enter, send an email to jsbailey@jsbaileywrites.com with Audiobook G...
January 23, 2018
No New Ideas?
I've already had five author events this month (no, I don't have a lot of free time!). I talk to lots of people at my events, and I happened to have two people at two of these events mention the same concern to me:
That there are no new ideas.
In the first instance, the man who mentioned this to me was worried because he'd always wanted to write a novel, but ended up reading another novel that turned out to be nearly iden...
