Hi! It’s been some time since I last updated the blog.
I’m still writing. Every day I put words on the page. It’s slow going. I wish I could write faster.
My most recent story, Gods, Men, and Nephilim, was published in the anthology Swords and Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 6.
Prior to that, my story The Mistress of the Marsh was published in the anthology Swords and Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 5.
Clever readers will notice a trend. I’m turning these and other unpublished stories into the chapters of a novel taking place in a fantasy version of ancient Rome. A straightforward swords and sorcery tale, something fun to read.
Still, it’s been a few years since I produced a work of any length. My last novel, The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel, was published in 2018. Five years is a long time between books, and my current work won’t be ready for publication until at least 2024.
So what happened?
The easy answer is that Covid happened. I didn’t get terribly sick, but the lockdowns and associated insanity ate up a good bit of my time and attention.
When my son’s school went digital at the beginning of the lockdowns it fell to me to be his schoolteacher. I made sure he did his elementary school assignments, added extra reading, and took him places throughout the day to get him out of the house. We didn’t lock down. We went to parks and nature preserves and playgrounds every single day, because it would be destructive and stupid to keep a growing, healthy child indoors all day over a disease that had an effectively zero percent chance to kill him or even make him seriously ill.
The Covid lockdowns were my chance to shine as a man who ranks high on the Disagreeability Scale. When everyone was complaining about weight gain (the Covid 19), I adopted a system of fasting and weightlifting that I still use today. When our leaders suggested we stay inside to keep from getting sick, I went outside to get fresh air and sunlight. When Doordash and Uber Eats became the way to eat, we had more and more home-cooked meals. In the end, the pandemic did wonders for my family’s health, and my son’s reading/language skills raised significantly.
Even so, the time spent being my son’s teacher, while a great experience, pretty much killed my writing for months. By March of 2020, when the state instituted lockdowns, I’d written the first draft of one novel and was about a quarter of the way through the sequel when I had to stop writing until June. This was a good thing: the books weren’t good. Jealous of writers who could crank out a novel once every two months, I had been trying to emulate that success in both speed and marketability, rather than writing good books. Much of it was crap, as I learned upon a good long review of the first draft. It’s salvageable, and I want to get back to it some day, but by the time I was able to sit back down at the writing desk, I had lost faith in the project. (Superheroes. A novel series about superheroes. I know. It’s still a cool concept, what I worked out.)
I got about halfway through my next project, which was a space opera about First Contact with intelligent alien life, before I needed a break. I had a decent outline and knew where I wanted it to go, but I was concerned that the format might be too close to my first novel series, which was complex, bordering on complicated. Too many characters, too much going on. Some day I want to pick that back up, too.
The break I took was to write a swords and sorcery story; I’d found an advertisement from Parallel Universe Publications looking for stories in that genre, and it’s something I’d always wanted to dip into. The success of that story, The Green Wood, spurred me to write more in that setting, leading me to today.
There it is. A peek under the hood. It takes me longer to write not because I’m so great, but because it just takes me longer to write. My friend Joe Hirsch has a much higher output, and he’s one of the best writers I know.
So, I’m still here. Still at it.
Thank you for reading, as always.
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