Sticky post: Starting points

IseTher (Light-ish Novellas), The Healers' Road (Book 1)

Hello!

If you’re new here, here’s where to start! (The opposite of the other sticky post!)

The Healers book 1 of 3: The Healers’ Road

by S.E. Robertson

Genre/keywords: slice-of-life fantasy, shouting-distance-from-cozy fantasy but check the content warnings first please, character-driven, road trip from hell, enemies to friends

Second chances and unexpected friends

Agna Despana has studied magical healing for nearly half her life, and now she finally gets to prove herself. Ambitious, opinionated, and out of her depth, she will plan her way out of any situation. Except the presence of the dismissive doomsayer she’s been matched up with.

Keifon the Medic has nearly given up. Having lost his family, his old life, and his revolutionary ex-boyfriend, he puts himself at the gods’ mercy to give him a new purpose. Maybe helping people as a medic will suffice. If only he weren’t saddled with this pompous young heathen.

Assigned as partners, the two travel the back roads with a merchants’ caravan, providing medical aid. They each have all the answers, but it will take a long journey, some chance encounters, and a deep look inside to reach the truth.

The Healers’ Road is an enemies-to-friends low-stakes fantasy road trip with warm campfires, good books, and the power of healing yourself as well as others.

On Amazon – print and ebook, and on Kindle Unlimited where available
On Goodreads – rate and review

Content Notes / Trivia

How I Became a Therapist in Another World , novella 1 of 6

by C.A. Moss [also me]

Genre/keywords: fantasy isekai but make it tired, millennial, and gay; let’s throw all the tropes in a blender with a giant pile of feelings and see what we get; fish out of water; empathy as a superpower; humor and heart

Not the Chosen One, just doing my best 

After an unexpected accident, Cat wakes up in a new body in a world full of magic. If this is the afterlife, it’s a lot more cottagecore than she expected — even though it’s also haunted by demons that prey on people’s emotions.

Good thing this world summoned the right vintage-loving queer girl, because Cat — now Lavender — was a therapist on Earth. Wielding magic that gives others space to face their literal demons, she sets out to make a new life for herself. 

A world of new friends, territorial Earthlings, rampaging dragons, high society balls, and rollicking nights at the tavern is just down the country road. But so is the reckoning of what she’s lost…

How I Became a Therapist in Another World is a light fantasy heartwarming isekai novella with emotional moments and a wlw human/orc romance side plot. Lavender’s story continues in parts 2-4.

On Amazon – ebook and Kindle Unlimited where available
Books 1-4 are also available as an omnibus in ebook and print.
On Goodreads

Content Notes / Trivia

Nerd minute, August edition

anime nerd corner

Hooray, I’m not the only person swearing up and down that Buddy Daddies had some layers (as well as some extremely bad decisions in the last story arc)

We’re still hanging onto Masterful Cat, though I feel bad for anyone who thought this show was soothing going into it. I don’t like the judginess of the term “cringe comedy”, but Human Whatsherface is useless, and the show seems to know it. Sometimes the joke is that her cat is her mom, usually the joke is that she’s the cat and the cat is the human, but I’m not so sure they really care about one another so much as that she’d die in squalor without him. Which is pretty cynical. Maybe on my part, if I’m misreading the situation.

I’m not quite hate-watching, I guess? Yukichi the Cat is great. I want better things for him that I know he’s never going to get. Occasionally it’s funny, particularly the mental contortions the side characters go through to avoid realizing the premise of the show. But the colors are still distractingly ugly.

Undead Murder Farce is fun, though. Yes, it’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Anime. Yes, it turned the Phantom of the Opera into Arsene Lupin’s sulky bishounen boyfriend. (not literally, settle down, but… basically.) You can either get on board and hang on, or give it a hard pass. I am entertained.

Spy x Family is coming back in the fall, along with The Saint’s Magic Power is Omnipotent, which I haven’t watched yet but seriously mean to, and Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun, kind of, with some kind of wacky-hijinks sidestory thing. (Bananapants title, surprisingly cool show, by the way.) Two currently airing shows feels like enough for me, since I probably won’t be caught up with Omnipotent anywhere near then, but we’ll have to see.

[edit: An odd bit of trivia, too: This month was the first time Therapist outsold Healers in terms of sheer numbers across their respective series, although Healers 1 was still the top single book. Vaguely interesting. However future months shake out is also fine, though; I don’t have a real plan here. Just moving forward.]

[Edit 2, a week later — so after Masterful Cat episode 8 — I take it back, that headbutt was heartwarming as hell. Though I think the episode hiccupped and repeated half a scene? Was that a wrap around a commercial break, maybe? Anyway, Useless-chan shows that she is good at something, and Yukichi is adorably Concerned. Though in the grand tradition of overthinking everything, I can’t help but notice the weird combination of “gross jokes about marriageability” + “female character who gets to be a complete hot mess” + “male character who unapologetically loves cleanliness, cooking, and idol singers and wears a frilly apron to the grocery store”. Is this show accidentally doing a gender thing? My head hurts.]

Good news & bad news

The Process

Well, Goodreads believes I’m C.A. Moss. So much so that they merged the author profile with my actual reading profile, which is not, you know, Crafted for Maximal Social Media Engagement(tm). On top of that, the widget I included with the SER book list (currently on the right sidebar) has since been deprecated, so I literally can’t generate one for the new name. I didn’t realize that till I got into the author account and then did some googling about why most of the widgets were gone.

So now I have linked that account to my personal one for absolutely no reason~

(Hi, I have had Wonderbook in my “currently reading” for almost four years now. It’s a good book! I don’t know why I haven’t finished it! Everybody be cool, okay, I’m insecure about what a slow reader I am. That example is excessive, but just generally. I can’t seem to sit down and read anything for hours on end unless I’m on vacation. It’s not good.)

Oh well. I at least updated CA’s profile. Honestly, it’s okay from this side of things. It’s a system for readers, and I don’t intend to do any publicity through it. Just thought it would be nice to have the little graphical list on the sidebar. SHRUG.

(It has bugged me for a while that the widget shows the old cover for Healers 1 — which I liked, but that I couldn’t expand into a series, since it was a one-off cover — soooo maybe that plus the lack of symmetry will eventually drive me to take that one down. We’ll see.)

Some minor making of sausage

The Process

Still existing. Added links to Goodreads on the Therapist sales page, because I was just informed that those books are on Goodreads. Which I’d kind of forgotten about, despite using it as a checklist system for myself as a reader? Anyway, those are up. It would be kind of nice to add a sidebar widget with those books as well, but first Goodreads has to believe I’m also this person. The application is in.

In other constructive procrastination news, I started mostly moving from Google Drive to Atticus, which is a cloud-based paid service aimed at authors (I don’t use that word for myself, but y’know, that’s who the service caters to). This is a two-part decision based on a) the fact that Atticus seems to be quite useful for ebook and print layout, which saves me a lot of work, and b) I don’t agree with Google’s data scraping for AI. I don’t harbor any conspiracy theories about my work being “stolen”; it’s more of an “I’m tired of this techbro bullshit and don’t want to make myself into fodder for it any more than I have to” stance.

Atticus is not, unfortunately, as usable on mobile as it is on a computer. At least in my experience. Nor can it be used for sharing documents, because that’s just not what it’s for — which is fine. So I will continue to use Google Drive for things like brainstorming/notes and reference documents for art commissions. It has drawbacks. I don’t trust it to be secure. But I’m willing to compromise for some purposes.

That said, I’m going to sound like a shill when I say that I enjoyed trying out the layout tools in Atticus. It is so much easier than what I was doing before. I haven’t ordered a test print of the Therapist omnibus yet, but I look forward to it.

However, as much as it pains me to have a prettier option at my fingertips, I don’t intend to redesign the Healers paperbacks at this point. I live in fear that somebody will have bought books 1 and 2 before the redesign, land on 3 after the redesign, and promptly rip my jugular out because they don’t match. I do not need that in my life. They’ll stay as they are unless there’s some drastic need to change them.

Games update: Finished Pokemon Violet‘s main plotline and, since I can’t trade, did not bother trying to fill out any more of the Pokedex. Then played through Road 96 and Storyteller in quick succession (extremely quick, in the latter case). I enjoyed both of them, although Storyteller is ~2 hours long for $15, so y’know. I don’t demand that every single game be 200 hours long, but it seems worth mentioning.

After that, I looked at the funds remaining in my Switch account and the games on my wishlist and, despite my grousing that I wasn’t in the mood for another RPG, went with Final Fantasy VI Pixel Remaster.

I first played the original version (well, the US port, anyway) around my junior year of high school; it might also have been the summer between my junior and senior year. I bought Final Fantasy III (US) with my own money, which I had hardly any of. Did you know that AAA games with battery saves still cost about $60 in 1994? About $120 in today’s money, according to a quick search. So it felt like a big deal.

Should be fun. I’m only a couple of hours in, and already running into the need to grind for exp. Sigh. Still, it’ll entertain me a while.

100% whole bean, un-ground whatever-it-is-I-do-here

Recs, The Process

Recently I came across this essay, “Be Whoever You’re Gonna Be” by Dave Walsh. TBH, I don’t know who this is, but I really appreciated the essay. (I found it through the always entertaining blog of romance author Jenny Trout; I appreciated her reaction to the essay too.)

Okay, so I started self-publishing in 2014. After the initial “gold rush,” but a hell of a long time ago in internet terms. I have never, for basically one nanosecond, done anything Right(tm) according to any advice doled out for people in this situation. This used to bother me! A lot! A whole hell of a lot. When I started out, bright-eyed and ready to learn, I joined some self-publishing forums. I was told all my efforts were worthless because I hadn’t quit my day job, and as such, nothing I did counted or meant anything. I was told nobody would ever read anything I wrote because I didn’t devote my entire life to marketing. I was told so, so many things. It used to bother me so, so much.

Because I care about this stuff, you know? I love writing. Sometimes it’s frustrating and sometimes it’s hard and I’m never quite as good as I want to be, but imagine that: I like doing this thing that I have chosen to spend a lot of my free time on. Also? I was raised to base my own self-worth on what other people say about me. It’s not good. I’ve been working on that. It’s gotten a lot better.

Here’s the thing, though. I don’t need to slag people who spend a lot of time on marketing, or who research their keywords in order to come up with a story, or who publish every month. Whatever they do doesn’t have any bearing on what I do, and I don’t spend my time slinging shit at them or telling them they’re worthless. Because I don’t need to justify my decisions or cover up my own insecurity.

Just.

Saying.

I’m going to rant. If you didn’t know that, hi. Welcome. You must be new here.

A tweak and an apology

Sales
  1. I’ve dropped the price of the Therapist novellas to 99 cents. I could ramble about why they were priced higher in the first place, how I hoped that maybe this would prove that my work was worth more than I’ve historically charged for it, etc., but the truth of the matter is that it’s just not working. So I dropped the price after all.
  2. I am very sorry to anyone who bought the new book at full price when it went down so quickly after release. I did not intend to scam anyone. I think Amazon is lenient with returns on ebooks if you want to pursue that route. With my sincere apologies.
  3. I have thinned out some of the storefronts that weren’t working. Here’s what’s staying:
    • Healers: Amazon and Gumroad
    • Therapist: Amazon; Gumroad for the first book only (still PWYW including free).

As I was de-listing everything on Kobo, I found out that apparently I have sold 106 books there lifelong. Which isn’t technically nothing, but it feels like it. Maybe I’m just feeling discouraged right now; I’ll own up to that.

So that and Nook are out. I am not considering putting Healers back on Kindle Unlimited at this point, but I might with Therapist once the omnibus is ready. If so, it would have to come down from Gumroad.

Okay, enough literal shop talk. I’m marking this post “sales” because of the price drop, though I expect it to be permanent. Thanks!

Fixed.

games nerd corner, IseTher (Light-ish Novellas)

Incredibly minor thing, but the content/trivia links for Therapist 4 are fixed. They previously both went to Content. Which, honestly, is preferable to the reverse — the content lists are at least theoretically useful, and I don’t seriously expect anyone to read the trivia.

I just do those because that’s how my own brain works — when I am even moderately emotionally engaged in a piece of media, I feel the impulse to learn everything I can about how it was made. Obviously, most people are not like this. Though some are; <3 to all those minutiae obsessives on TVTropes and IMDB who feed my obsession.

That’s about all for now. It’s only been 4 days since the last release. If I were a real indie I’d be *checks imaginary watch* finishing the next draft by now. But luckily for my sleep patterns, I am not.

Gave up the “level up everything” strategy in Pokemon Violet at level 35. I just could not take it anymore. Instead, I separated my army into types and now level up all of the types needed for the next challenge. Ex., I am taking on the Psychic gym next, so I’m leveling up all of the Bug, Dark and Ghost types. I won’t end up using them all, but that’s how I’m compromising with my usual playstyle.

I also leveled up to the range where I can take advantage of Wholesale Chansey Slaughter Happy Fun Time outside the Fairy base, and that helps tremendously. Between that and Dugtrio Search and Destroy in the mountain pass area for slightly lower level groups, we should be set for a little while.

It’s happening?

IseTher (Light-ish Novellas)

Therapist Book 4 is processing on Amazon. What?? I could have waited another week, but I kind of wanted to stop worrying about it. It’s as finished as I’m going to make it, I think.

It’s July 22, 2023. I started writing book 1 in late September, 2022. I’ve expressed disbelief time and again about how fast this project came along, and here I am again. There’s a common bit of advice around self-publishing, “pick a popular genre that you actually like, write in it, and you’ll make lots of money” (something like that, I don’t pay much attention).

That hasn’t happened; this series isn’t selling. Probably because I can’t do anything normal, and this is yet another genre-mashing exercise instead of writing to market like everyone says you should. Maybe because I still haven’t done any advertising. But you know what? I’ve had a lot of fun, and I think it’s been good for me to switch gears for a while. I don’t think it’s ruined my touch with the Healersverse, at least based on the WIP I’ve been working on. It’s been refreshing just to do something different. I’ll go back to my serious(tm) universe and be happy to do so — I don’t think I’ll be free of that universe anytime soon, my brain still lives in it — but it’s been a fun vacation.

This sounds like it’s all over, but I’ve also been working on a set of side stories since I finished the second draft of book 4; if all goes well I’ll release them all in a kind of sidestory omnibus someday. (I cannot justify buying separate cover art for more novellas. It’s been really fun, but I have to be a little more practical.) I also intend to release the 4-novella set in ebook and print later this year.

But for now? Lavender’s story is soon to be out there at last, and I’m happy about it. That’s all.

Forward motion

games nerd corner, The Process

Writing: As of last week, I reached 200 days working on some aspect of writing every day — either writing or editing. Lately I’ve been alternating between the second Therapist side story and the Healersverse prequel / side story. Trying to get my daily word count up, since there have been some really, REALLY minimal days — but as long as I keep working on something to the extent my focus and energy can manage, I’m all right with it. It’s something.

Meanwhile, the cover for the Therapist omnibus is in progress, and looking great. Looking forward to that. Book 4 is in the hands of one more beta reader and the cover is done, so we’re still more or less on track for an August release for that.

I also signed on to beta read two other people’s novels, and doing not as well with that than I had the last few times. By no fault of the writers at all; my focus is just shot lately. So there’s another goal. Get the word count up, and beta read more.

Entertainment corner: Still grinding away at Pokemon Violet. As I probably mentioned, I’ve always had the habit of leveling up my party evenly in games where you can swap party members in and out, e.g. Final Fantasy Tactics and the like. This habit is beginning to kick my ass in Pokemon. I have about 250 party members, and can only level up 6 at a time. It’s extremely slow going. But I have yet to change my strategy. Podcast on, game on mute, wander around, fight a bunch of things. Repeat repeat repeat.

The current anime season is… …existing.

In which I really start ranting about power fantasies as a concept

I… have not made a mistake, and yet

IseTher (Light-ish Novellas)

subhead: One way the sausage is made, if you can’t draw but need to hire someone who can

Now that book 4 of Therapist is almost ready, I turned toward preparing the omnibus edition. This will consist of all 4 novellas in the series, packaged together for print and possibly ebook.

I’ve really liked the individual novella covers I’ve commissioned so far, but a wraparound cover for a paperback is an entirely different kettle of fish. I knew I’d have to start fresh, because as far as I can tell, the cover artist for 1/2/4 isn’t doing complicated-background stuff right now. (Hey, I could be wrong!)

Anyway, I laid out the combo package for print (which is just a long, tedious, but IMO satisfying process in Word) and got the template for the cover from Amazon. This is a layout graphic based on the size of the finished paperback, not only the trim size (trade paperback, etc.) but the width of the spine, which is dependent on the number of pages. So. I added this to the reference document I’d put together, which is a description of the kind of vibe and scene I’m looking for, the art I already have of the character who appears on this cover as well, and examples of similar art that I’ve found out there online. [I always dreaded this process because I thought I had to have preexisting art of the characters, but so far the ref docs I’ve assembled seem to have worked for the artists I’ve commissioned, even when I didn’t have preexisting art. So I think it’s working??]

I posted on r/artcommissions last night, which is a lively community at the slowest of times. I woke up to 56 comments and 7 direct messages from artists, and I think some more came in today. Now, I’m sure some people throw their hat in the ring whenever they can even if their style isn’t what was asked for, and I kind of don’t fault them for that. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, and all of that. Plus, I posted a budget that I honestly think is commensurate with the scope of the project, and not lowballing probably helps my chances.

But um. I am currently eyeball-deep in fantastic art portfolios. I wish I could hire them all. Honestly, though, I am going to bookmark every single one and keep them in mind for future projects. Y’ALL ARE SO TALENTED, I CANNOT HANDLE IT.

My old sneaking impulse to commission some more Healers art is bouncing around my brain, too — not for covers, just to frame and hang in my house. I commissioned a piece years and years ago when I was tabling at anime conventions, but so far that’s the only Healers visual media that exists besides the amigurumi I made (because I’m a sentimental dork). The space right over my writing desk is all vaporwave-ish space stuff currently (the vertical poster here and this Lego set), but we are assembling a fantasy-nerd gaming room, so y’know. It could also go there.

Anyhow, I’ve got some art to look at, woo hoo.

Edit to add: Watchlist-wise, we finished Bocchi the Rock! — recommend, alarmingly relatable — and I just watched the first episode of Land of the Lustrous. Boy, this series is pretty. Also, let’s note that I have rambled here before about wanting to write about a character that everyone inherently/instinctively dislikes, even though they haven’t done anything particularly wrong; they just have something naturally repellent about them. I’m like this IRL, but so rarely see this type in fiction (people are just as repelled from fictional characters like this, I guess). It’s a very lonely feeling. (The What We Do in the Shadows TV series has one, but he thrives on others’ discomfort. While this is funny, I do not thrive on being this way IRL. It really, really sucks.)

Enter Cinnabar from LotL, an alien who uncontrollably exudes literal poison (mercury, to be exact) and is exiled from the rest of their species because of it. Hi, Cinnabar. I don’t think this will end well for you, but I’m paying attention.