Monthly Archives: August 2024

Roundup of interesting and cranky things

as a reader

This podcast episode (part one of two) about Thomas Kinkade was a hell of a listen this week. Like a lot of middle-class(ish) Americans who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, this art was omnipresent in the atmosphere for a large chunk of my life. And as an enthusiast of jigsaw puzzles and embroidery, let me tell you, this aesthetic is still inescapable in certain quarters.

But inadvertently, these episodes also illuminated (ha) for me how I feel about other forms of art built to be technically skilled, hearken to a mythical small-town past, and avoid any hint of complexity lest it make anyone uncomfortable for a split second.

That kind of art makes a lot of people feel warm and fuzzy and uplifted, and that’s great for them. I hope they enjoy it. They don’t have that effect on me, though. Maybe I’m just a broken human being; I don’t deny that. But it was gratifying to me to hear that someone else out there is left cold by the sort of thing that’s supposedly universally appealing.

I’m not going to be a snob about it — if you love that kind of art, in any medium, I love that for you. But they don’t hit me the way they’re intended to hit their target audience. So I guess I’m just not in their target audience.

Some threads with interesting book recs:

Books with ace/allo romance : r/LGBTBooks (reddit.com)
It must be Yell About How Great At the Feet of the Sun Is o’clock again, how time flies.

Looking for ace/aro protagonist : r/LGBTBooks (reddit.com)
A shorter list, but one with some good references.

(Am I dealing with guilt over having an aspec antagonist in my next story? Obviously, yes. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.)

Book Catch-up: I Don’t Know What Cozy Is, plus chainsaws

as a reader

As of this morning, I’ve finally finished all the books I bought during the first Cozy the Day Away Sale in April. Yeah, four months ago. I bought about 30 books, I’m a slow reader, and I jumped in and out of the list as well as other unrelated books. But now we’re done!

And I have even less idea of what “cozy” is than I did when I started. Well, that’s useful information in itself. I’d hoped to learn, and I did; just not what I expected to learn.

More books: I am apparently simultaneously a 14 year old boy and a 45 year old woman with two kids

Powers: Organizing useless information

anime nerd corner, Therapist in Another World Series

Short update:

  • Shuffled around some of the pages in the Therapist section to organize them in an “Extras” section, and finally added a character list for that series. (Eventually I’d like to do the same for Healers, but that’s a longer list, and I’d like to focus on finishing Strangers first.)
  • Got the art for the Bardbarian cover, and I am super stoked!
  • Anime nerd corner: Senpai is an Otokonoko is so goddamn cute, people, I can’t handle it. The “dolphin vs. whale” metaphor hit me directly in my gray-ace heart, even though I think they were aiming for aromantic. That’s fine. I can vibe with it while knowing it isn’t made “for” me.
  • I’m pursuing other options for a full re-cover of the Healers series. I have been working with an artist on art for book 1, but I’m not sure it’s going to work out. If it does, that will be a happy bonus that we’ll use as promotional art.

o/` It’s coming o/`

Therapist in Another World Series

It sounds like I’m going back on my plans to say that the next Therapist book is almost done, but here’s the truth of it: I really am working actively on the next Healers book, but Therapist 8 was already in the pipeline at the time. While my Fearless Alpha Reader read through a draft of the first ?half? of Strangers, I finished my second draft of Therapist 8.

The cover is in the works by the same artist as book 7 (and I LOVE IT), I’m doing my own last edits before getting any beta readers involved, and I hope to have it out within the next couple of months if all goes well.

After that, full steam ahead on Strangers, with my own suspicions about the outline confirmed: the pacing will fit into two years rather than three, as I’d originally outlined. (Yes, the same timeframe as Healers 1, leave me alone. The “oh wait, this person I hate is a human after all, and I’ve been a jerk” moment comes after ~6 months instead of ~3, for starters)

It’s an unusual feeling for me to be energized and optimistic about two projects at once. Riding it out as long as possible. Besides, over the last two years I’ve tried to develop better habits so that I keep writing even if “inspiration” hasn’t struck. It helps.

Still waffling on joining the fall group sale. It’s a great sale, and they keep building on it; that’s not the issue. I’m waffling on whether I belong there. The more I read of the other books that have been in the sale, the less commonality I see between them – they are truly a range of storylines and tones. So I’m having a little bit of a Bilbowhyshouldn’ti.gif moment about it. If those other books can vary so much, is mine close enough to that range to fit in?

But that’s further off. Don’t worry, I now have a page-long writing-related to-do list to keep all of these projects moving. Self-publishing and plate-spinning go hand in hand.

Unlock skill: Outline

website news

Still working on Strangers, still going well. Yay, I was able to organize my thoughts after all, and it has helped make the process easier. See, I learned something on my writing vacation that I was then able to bring back to my first series. Hero’s journey, or something.

I’m also trying to learn about newsletters. How they work. What might make one worthwhile. In the long run, what I think I might do is take the sort of chatter I’ve been putting on the blog, edit it to be less scattered, concentrate it into two channels, and form that into a newsletter for each of my series. Not that often, I think; maybe monthly once it gets going. Then this blog would be more for straightforward updates and maybe some progress notes. I do like to reassure people that the wheels are still turning.

That also means I have to write some interesting extras that will make it worth people’s while to sign up, which is challenging. So it’s not happening yet, but I hope it’s in the future somewhere. I will warn everyone on the current list and give them a chance to jump ship if that’s not what they want.

So that’s what’s happening. Moving right along.