Parenthetical phrasing because, man, this world just ain’t as predictable as she used to be.
Happy New Year, folks, I hope y'all enjoyed the holiday season, and may God bless you and yours in 2025.
As I sit down to write this, it’s 7:20 PM on January 1st, 2025. We have Babylon 5 on in the background, fitting one last episode in before the kids go to bed. With the turning of the year, I tend to get reflective, especially on my writing career.
Like many folks who have to be authors—and I firmly believe you don’t keep at this business unless you have to, because there are lots of easier ways to make money—I’ve got a lot of life outside the fictional universes my imagination prefers to live in. I am certainly not complaining about that—my wife and kids are more important than anything I’ll ever write. And, while far beneath family in importance, my day job is with a great company and is, itself, engaging and rewarding, though in a much different manner than writing is or the Army was.
Still, I sometimes get frustrated that I’m not writing more, writing faster. I stare on in awe at those of my friends who put out multiple novels a year. I’m really trying to get to the point that, even with a full time job, I can reliably turn in a novel a year. Not there yet, but still fighting for it.
My first published short story, “For a Few Camels More,” appeared in the anthology, Those in Peril, edited by James L. Young and published by Chris Kennedy. That was February of 2019, so I’m just shy of six years into this author thing as a professional—"professional," by the simplest definition of, "getting paid for doing the thing."
Getting to that point was a much longer process, of course. My first attempt at a fantasy novel I wrote on an old IBM running MS-DOS. It was a flagrant pastiche of the DragonLance Chronicles trilogy, which I still love. In my defense—I was nine years old. Point being, it's been a journey to get this far. Like most authors, I hope to some day relate the story of my decades-long journey to overnight success.
From 2019 to today, I’ve written two collaborative novels published by Baen. And I’ve appeared in ten anthologies total from, variously, Baen, Chris Kennedy Publishing, and Raconteur Press.
In 2024 alone, I appeared in three anthologies from Raconteur Press and one independently published anthology by my friend, James L. Young. I finished and published, along with my friends Tom Kratman and Kacey Ezell, the second novel in the Romanov Reign alternate history series, 1919: The Romanov Rising. For me, that’s not bad progress.
I always recommend buying local, but if you don't have a favorite indie bookstore handy, the links in the pics above are Amazon affiliate links, and I do make a tiny bit of commission off them.
So what’s next? Well, the next big milestone I haven’t hit yet as an author is a solo novel on the shelves, which is my focus right now.
I am currently in the midst of heavy revisions on a military fantasy novel, working title Gods and Men Alike. At it’s core it’s a story about two young officers from very different backgrounds caught up in a complex war—oh and the Olympian gods are real, magic and monsters are a thing at the same time as machine guns, and our young subalterns must survive the machinations of mortals and immortals while fulfilling their duty and holding to their beliefs. I do not have a contract for this one yet, though I have high hopes for it.
I’m doing my best to complete those revisions soon, because, as far as I can tell, 1919: The Romanov Rising (out from Baen right now) is off to a good start, so we’ll need to get cranking on the third volume ASAP. That will almost certainly be next on the to-do list after I finish and submit Gods And Men Alike. Tom, Kacey, and I definitely intend to get those loving the series another volume faster this time without compromising quality.
Concurrently to all that I’m gearing up to start a monthly newsletter—I own the rights to enough short stories, to gin up a good magnet or two. Hoping to get that off the ground in Q1. Also, I’m trying to keep this blog up to date--wish me luck and let me know if it's of value to you.
There are other projects in the works, but everything else is either embryonic or classified enough that I can't talk about it yet.
To sum it all up, 2024 was a good writing year, and there’s lots to look forward to in 2025 and beyond. As frustrated as I can get with my time constraints, I’m not so foolish that I’m not grateful to the editors, publishers, coauthors, and peers who have helped me develop as an author, and most of all, readers who have handed over hard-earned money and irreplaceable time to read my stories. From the bottom of my not-entirely-cold-black-heart--thank you all.
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