This is gonna be a whole thing

hey, hi. I write things. I’ve been writing things a long time and in 2007 I started writing one of the best things I’ve ever written in my life.

I wrote background. I researched. I ended up with a truly staggering amount of information that basically served as a Bible for writing this book. I revised and rewrote it until I was sick of looking at it. And finally, I published it on my own in 2010.

Reviews were good. I had people telling me they couldn’t believe it was my first book, a reviewer telling me they despised one of the characters but couldn’t stop reading it, and my favorite thing to hear; you write amazing dialogue. Since then, I’ve gone on to publish genre romance fiction under a different name to some small degree of success. I have a check mounted on my wall from a local bookstore who used to sell my books before COVID forced them to change their model. Beside it is an award I received. I did OK.

And then I lost it. Writing felt like a chore. I wrote some novellas and books I’m very proud of and some that I rushed through because I had to. Self-promo is exhausting. AI scraped my works but not enough to count in the big Anthropic settlement. Indie publishing has big five. But most of us do it because we love it, and I no longer loved it.

I did publish a novella last year, Last Breath, as part of an anthology, and in my opinion, it’s pretty good. It was meant to lead into a series of PNR/UF books but I just could not make words come. I haven’t published it widely yet, not wanting to get people excited for a book that never comes.

Things are changing though. I’ve changed. I’m rewriting Plans, the first book I wrote and published, but I’m doing it differently. I’m re-editing, re-writing, and starting with a new first chapter entirely that is much more the style I write now. My plan is to post it here, chapter by chapter, and maybe one day publish it again.

Along the way, I’m also going to post art I’ve commissioned of the characters, thoughts about my process, and maybe talk about the writing group that I run twice a month at the community center. I don’t know how this will turn out. But I’ll focus on this quote I saw in Chicago that helped start the whole damn thing.