Dear Inklings,
Apologies for the last minute missive. We're truly in the dog days now, huh? July has been a series of heat waves - where my brain just does not want to cooperate - mingled with stress over work - in particular, stress over gearing up to find a new job.
It hasn't all been bad, so let's start with the good! Ash and I finished the Hexmark campaign on the second weekend of the month. We booked what has become my favorite AirBnB, a little cottage in our local area. We each wrote a bit - Ash more than me - but mostly we played out Cami's 9th and final year of school, culminating in the much awaited trip to hell to finally defeat the Emperor/King of Demons and change all the demons back into the beings of light they once were. Cami died protecting Alastair when the Emperor charged towards him with Elias's sword (after pinning Elias to the ground with his own - Elias is undead, he's fine). I knew that was coming.
What I didn't know was that her death - in particular her fiance Eetu, who is both a 21 year old boy and a super powerful god, feeling the moment of her death - would cause a cosmic explosion, recreating the primordial being of Time in the form of Cami's older brother and one of her best friends, Tadeo. Alastair and Elias were able to defeat the Emperor and save both hell and earth. And Alastair was able to use his newly bestowed wish magic to bring Cami back. Almost everyone ended up immortal. It was a dramatically wonderful end to a dramatically wonderful campaign. The first game I've ever experienced from start to finish as a player, and I think that was even more meaningful because I got to play Cami from the age of 12 to 20, really seeing her come into her own. We'll have other campaigns in this world. We're gearing up for a couple possibly in the fall. But the first one ended beautifully.
I had my second best writing month with about 16,880 words written, and most of that was due to another Blorboverse event. I hosted this one. The characters I brought into the RP included Cami and Celin, as well as a few of my favorites from Luminhaven. This ended up being my favorite event so far, and because half of the blorbos there decided to adopt the main NPC of the event - a little sea elf girl named Erysa who was trapped in a keep surrounded by ocean and secretly cursed to turn into a monster at night - that is now a new character of mine who exists in some canonical fashion in three different worlds. Including Ionnarah, though not in such a direct way. Maybe one day I'll be able to explain that better.
I still didn't write as much as I'd hoped to, but I did better than June, and hopefully in August I'll do better than July. And I worked on all three of my current WIPs! I actually got quite a lot of editing done for Time's Sacrifice Book #2, which felt good.
Now for the work search stress. For a while, I've been burning out in the world of tech support for months now, and some developments at work have made me expedite my search for a new job. My last day at my current job is in the middle of August, and then I'll have until the end of August to find something before finances start to get scary.
Unfortunately, we live in an economy. Every time I have to search for a new job, that search comes with a big helping of despair. This one led to one of my worst depressive episodes all year (I'm fine, and I'm grateful for all the therapy I've had that this was what worst depressive episode of the year looked like). What I'd love to do is return to freelance writing and have my own schedule. But that's still not feasible in the current market. I'd also love to just be able to write my books full time, which made the realization that I haven't sold a single book all year hit a little harder.
I rallied towards the end of the month. I sent my resume to every staffing agency I could find and started giving myself daily quotas for job applications to put in. I feel like in the time I have, I should be able to find something, even if it's not the most fulfilling job.
It has still put me in a bit of a funk with regard to my author career. As I said, I haven't sold any copies of Wounds all year. And that is fully my fault, as I haven't been putting in as much effort as I should to promote it...and I've been taking a while with the sequel. But it's still disheartening. I knew before I published that YA tended to do less well in the selfpub sphere than adult. A lot of teenagers just can't looking at indie books. I sometimes find myself worrying, "What if I'm just never able to get my books to the right audiences?"
One of my future projects, which is vying with Time's Sacrifice Book #2 and Fox Eyes to be my next book, is a YA fantasy school series. The premise is in some ways very classic. It's also...a little weird. One of the POVs is a 13 year old girl just starting out at Luminhaven. The other is her 18 year old cousin, starting his last year. In addition to being a sort of mix of older and younger YA, the book is secondary world high fantasy, with monsters and professional adventurers and gods and all that...but the setting feels modern. Characters dress in, more or less, jeans and hoodies. They have magical equivalents of text conversations and phone calls. They talk in a more modern way. And I love that it doesn't fit nicely into those little boxes. But I do worry that, especially in a landscape where YA doesn't always do well, people will think, "Who is this for?" and there won't be a very clear answer.
(I mean, it's for me. But I'd like it to be for other people, too. Especially kids and teens.)
The thing is, even if I tradpubbed - and I did briefly consider pulling Wounds from publication and trying to tradpub - there's no guarantee that those books would find their audiences. There's also more of a chance that I would be encouraged to shave down the weirdness. The queernormativity of Wounds. The lower-upper YA-ness of Luminhaven Chronicles. Then again, that might not happen. But I LIKE being able to work with the cover artists I want, and make my own boxes, and have total artistic freedom. And I have faith that there IS an audience out there for these books, even if I haven't found that yet.
I think what I actually want is to selfpub, but have much more time and resources to dedicate to marketing my stories. Which costs money. Which...brings us back to the despair. (I've said it before, summer does for me what winter does for my friends mental healthwise.) I suppose the good news is all of this has possibly motivated me to start applying to get into cons next year. Which will also cost money, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there.
I will, of course, keep you posted when I get there. Right now, though, the job applications take a little more precedence.
Hopefully I'll have some news and it will mostly be creative later this month!
Until then,
Alex
