So, like…where have I been?

So some of you might wonder why it’s been four years, since 2018’s The Fairies of Sadieville, since I’ve had a new novel out. What could I have been doing?

There’s a few answers to that. In the summer of 2018, I lost both my mother and my ten-year-old son. The double-whammy of losing both my past and future within three months was a blow that knocked me sideways in more ways than one, and as you can imagine, it took a while for me to get back on course. I’m not ashamed to say I saw a therapist, as did we all, and eventually got myself pointed back in the right direction.

Career-wise, when I finished the Tufa series, I was as a crossroads. As I’ve learned the hard way, my best work comes from writing the whole novel, not three chapters and a synopsis, or three chapters and a pitch, or a pitch based on an outline. But I tried all these, and they were all rejected because whatever talent I have doesn’t come out in those forms. It comes out in the final manuscripts.

I also know that to make something my best, I need to finish it and put it away for awhile so I can come back to it fresh for revisions. When I try to work straight through, I lose the perspective that’s so necessary to my polishing process. I worked for months on a horror novel (not Dandelion) that kept going off the rails, only I was so close to it (and so desperate to see something else in print) that I couldn’t grasp how wrong it had gone. That manuscript is currently in the “burn after death” pile, because it really is that bad, although the setting may resurface in another project one day.

Through all this, the publishing industry changed as well, and that forced a reset of my expectations for my career. Put bluntly, to the Powers That Be I’d had my shot at becoming a bestseller and hadn’t done so. As they say, writing is an art but publishing is a business, and that’s never been more true than right now, as reading plummets and publishers merge. So I had to address my career in new ways.

One of these new ways to return to horror, something I hadn’t written since my vampire novels Blood Groove and The Girls with Games of Blood. I landed on an idea I’d nursed for a long time, and which I’ll describe in more detail in coming posts. My other approach was to put stories in themed anthologies (and many thanks to the good folks at Zombies Needs Brains and West Street Publishing), as well as do some non-fiction writing about science fiction and horror films (thanks to Prof. Christopher McGlothlin at Ghost Show Press). These let me keep my hand in as I readied my next novel.

So I owe my new agent Paul Stevens, and my new publisher John Hartness at Falstaff Books, for having faith in what I still had to offer. And because of them, you’ll be reading about how my novel Dandelion, out October 1, 2022, came about.