What a wild week. The launch was a success, and 30 copies of my eBook activated at the stroke of midnight. At least two people have been reading on Kindle Unlimited, and several people have had paperbacks shipped and received! Not to mention the hardcovers which ship later this month. I’m so excited this many people are eager to read my work.

To celebrate the launch, and to celebrate our sixth wedding anniversary, my wife and I got some tasty tex-mex. Nothing says love and victory quite like a good burrito. I’ve been taking it easy on the writing front for a while now, as I was all-consumed with the production of Pallas Lost. It’s time to shake off the cobwebs and get back into the writer’s seat.

Which brings me to the point of today’s short blog. Please, share and encourage your friends and family to read Pallas Lost as well. Every little bit helps. And once you’ve read it, please review it. Reviews on Amazon are absolutely critical to the success of my novel. The algorithm demands a sacrifice, unfortunately. So please, write a review on Amazon, and Goodreads if you can, and help me become a success. They literally down rank you if you don’t get reviews. It’s a necessary evil in today’s digital marketplace.

I really can’t stress enough how important sharing and reviewing are. It’s by far the hardest part of being an independently published author; the percentage of people that review after purchasing is, like, low single digits. Please help me blow that out of the water. The more reviews, the more people get to see my novel.

I have a lot of irons in the fire right now, and it is a difficulty to deal with everything, everywhere, all at once. (I really need to see that movie.) I’m doing my best to juggle it all, and I am looking forward to recruiting Alpha readers for Pallas Found. It’s going to happen soon, I promise. Perhaps even as early as next month!

Hello everyone!

The release of Pallas Lost is here! The journey to being published is at an end, now the journey to selling copies has begun, ha ha. Thank you all so much for your determination and support as I bring this series to life.

Quite a few of you have contacted me about getting a signed copy. I want as many people to have a signed copy as I can, so I’ve come up with a few ways to get this done while covering my costs. The choices are basically a bookplate, a mailed signed copy, or an in person signing. If it involves mailing, I will be doing them in batches, hopefully once a week.

This is all new to me, so my more experienced friends, please, let me know if I should make changes!

FOR ALL REQUESTS:

Message me using the contact form and provide the name exactly as you wish to be addressed, which method you are choosing, and your address. I will reply and give you Venmo information and my address. Even if you think I know where you live or how to spell your name, please send it anyway. I am paranoid about making mistakes, ha ha.

BOOKPLATE:

For a signed bookplate (basically a fancy sticker that I’ve signed that you can either stick on the inside cover or just keep with the book), I expect the cost to be around $5. I’ll be packing them in an envelope with some cardboard to keep it from being ruined. This makes it a little more expensive to mail, but I think it will be nicer quality.

US or INTERNATIONAL

For a physical mailed signed copy, purchase the book of your choice and have it shipped to my address. Use the postal calculator at https://postcalc.usps.com/ to estimate the cost, and Venmo me that total. It’ll be in the Medium Flat Rate Box, as the books are 6”x9” and 7”x10”.

NICEVILLE

I am still figuring out a date for this, but I’ll be doing a signing at my parent’s house in Niceville some point in May on a weekend. You’ll be welcome to come in person, but you can also have it dropped off there and I’ll sign it for you to pick up later. I’ll be posting the date soon, but expect it to be in the latter half of the month.

AUSTIN

Nikki and I desperately want to visit Austin and do an in person signing. Mostly to see all of you! But it’s expensive, and all our money is going to Athena’s second surgery right now. I can’t even hazard a guess as to when such a trip will happen. So if you want to chance it and wait for us to visit, absolutely do that. We will eventually go, and we will definitely have a signing day, and it would be awesome to have it at Dragon’s Lair. If you don’t want to wait, follow the instructions for the US above.

Whew, that was a lot. If you have any questions, please comment and I’ll answer them publicly. I guess I need to go practice my signature!

As discussed a few weeks back, I have long held the belief that my writing is terrible. This is in spite of many people telling me that I was okay, even good, which I struggle to accept. This week heralds the occasion of me finally trying to accept those compliments. Two days from now, on May the 4^th, my debut novel Pallas Lost goes live.

I find it hard to believe that this is actually happening. Ten years of writing, shelving, editing, re-writing, and worrying have all come to a head this week. The eBook should go live at midnight, and the paperback and hardcover should be live by that point as well. As of time of writing, 30 people will have access immediately, which is just crazy. 

I can only hope that they enjoy it, and leave good reviews.

May the 4th is going to be a full day. Not only is it the release of my novel, it is also my wedding anniversary. Six years ago, my darling wife and I got married behind J. Lorraine Ghost Town in Manor, Texas. The location was a haunted house charity we volunteered at called Scare for a Cure. We had a lovely little wedding with a few dozen friends and family in attendance, complete with a taco bar, waffle bar, and a life-size BB-8 cake.

That’s right, the theme was Star Wars meets Mass Effect. There were lightsabers, blasters, and people in cosplay. The tables were festooned with custom coloring pages, Funko pops, and the “guest book” included Cards Against Humanity custom cards for guests to create.

All in all, it was a pretty great wedding. People we loved surrounded us. This has remained true. While some friendships have come and gone, others have stayed, strengthened, or even began anew. I’m ever grateful for those who were involved with the wedding, those who came, and those who watched via the livestream.

That wedding also marked the time of my wife getting sick. A mystery ailment struck her, and at the time all we knew was that she had tons of fatigue and wasn’t able to stay upright for long periods of time. The near future would see her with a cane, and then relegated to a wheelchair for longer distances. That wheelchair also travelled to Iceland with us a few years later for our honeymoon.

Six years is a long time, though. In those six years, she got very sick, but she has also greatly recovered. She no longer needs a cane to walk, and it has been a couple of years since she used that wheelchair. She still has some fatigue and memory issues, but overall she’s gotten a lot stronger.

Even when she was sick though, she was there for me. She buoyed me up and dealt with my worsening depression. She cheered me on and encouraged me when I showed glimmers of interest in hobbies and activities. She’s always done her best to try and elevate Team Jikki to be the best we could be.

I’m not great at public displays of affection. My depression, anxiety, and more lead to me struggling to feel, well, human most of the time. I may have been the one pushing the wheelchair for years, but Nikki is the one who stayed strong, always pushing me to be better.

Nikki, my darling, my impossible girl, my loving wife, I just want you to know that I love you with all my heart.  You are my everything, we are Team Jikki, and we’ll keep doing better.

Happy Anniversary, my love. Let’s go get tacos or something.

Last week’s post was a bit heavy for me, but talking about my imposter syndrome is important. Unfortunately that doesn’t solve it, but I like to think that it helps. This week I would like something a bit lighter, a bit more aspirational, but just as personal. That’s right, I’m here to talk about the Future.

As always, the Future is a muddling miasmic muck of vague hopes and ideals tempered by the crushing reality of doubt and fear. Despite the odds stacked against us, we all hope for a brighter future. Though I dare say that things have been very difficult for me on that front. This post aims to change that. Or at the very least, lay out a crude road map.

The launch of Pallas Lost is right around the corner, and that is both exciting and terrifying. Even though I’ve had great response so far from friends and family, that imposter syndrome is making it hard to hope the success will continue beyond that. But because humans are mercurial creatures capable of living with dichotomy, at the same time I have plans to continue the series.

The second book, Pallas Found, is 90-95% written. As I am a plantser by nature, during NaNoWriMo this year I took a turn I didn’t see coming. I completely invalidated my original ending, and I’m currently working out what the new one will look like. I’ve given myself a pretty good deadline, however. I intend to release Pallas Found in 2023, ideally one year to the day after Pallas Lost.

That is an ambitious goal, however. It took almost a decade to bring Pallas Lost to this point, and I’m determined not to let another decade go by without a follow-up. Plus, my wife will literally kill me if I renege on finishing the sequel. I hope to finish writing the first draft in the next month or so, and then pushing it to Alpha readers.

Hell, maybe a year is too optimistic. But I’m going to do my best to stick with it. Once I push the Alphas out, I’ll start laying the groundwork for the threequel. I always saw the Pallas story as a trilogy, and that plan hasn’t changed. It won’t end where or how I originally planned, however, so I’m excited to see where the story takes us all.

At the same time in the background I’ve been working on a fantasy series. It is based on my homebrew D&D setting, though significantly changed and tweaked to be altogether, well, novel when compared to the world of D&D. Part of my planning has been the creation of  unique races and creatures to populate the realm. The world is Pelynos, and the story takes place in Rhomeria. I don’t want to say too much more at this time because the story is still in its infancy.

After the Rhomeria book comes out, there will be others in that setting. I have ideas for other books in the Fifteen Systems universe to complement the Pallas books. By this point, who knows, maybe I’ll have other ideas that I’ll want to tackle instead. At the end of the day, I would just like my work to be at least somewhat successful. I’ve often said I’ll consider myself a successful author when I get my first fanart or cosplay.

We’ll see.

Last week I talked about my writing process, but I have a confession to make. I omitted a significant aspect of said process. I know, I know, I’m a monster. The sordid truth, however, is I did not omit something that actually helps me. What I decided to ignore was one of the most powerful forces affecting my writing: imposter syndrome.

For those who haven’t heard of it, imposter syndrome is a constant, persistent feeling that you are a fraud. That you don’t belong or that you don’t deserve your successes. That you either got through due to sheer, dumb, luck, or even a subconsciously malicious, nigh-paranormal skill at deceiving people.

It’s not rational. I know that. That doesn’t stop it from living rent-free in my head, however. For me, it basically presents as an unshakeable feeling that people are just being nice to me due to some strange feeling of obligation. Combined with my avoidant personality this means it is really, really hard for me to believe that what I do is any good. And even harder for me to express that fear to people.

For as long as I can recall, this has been my entire life. I’d work on world-building, stories, comics, and more without showing them to people. Some of them I did share; I had a rant-filled blog back in high school and a fairly terrible sprite comic that I like to think were at least slightly amusing to my friends. As I got older, those fears and worries grew and grew, to the point where I stopped sharing anything I was really working on.

I’d put on a game face and post snippets here and there, but that was difficult and tiring. Most of the time I didn’t bother. I figured people were too busy with their own stuff to care about mine. This is true of any Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any other post I’ve ever made as well.  Anything of mine that you have read has been difficult.

Pallas Lost represents what I hope is a paradigm shift in sharing. I’ve been sitting on the idea for the Fifteen Systems universe for over a decade. The rational part of me is agog at how long it really has been in the works. Getting down to brass tacks, I’ve had a sci-fi novel percolating in my brain for almost 30 years. I used to draw detailed diagrams of ships and laser guns, even theorizing how to make a “blaster” or “lightsaber” work in real life.

You can definitely see that I’ve wanted to be a writer for a while. And, dare I say, to become an author. The difference to me being an author is a published writer. That’s why I clung to traditional publishing as a long as I did; I was seeking external validation that a “professional” thought my work was good enough to release into the world. I low-key had the feeling that it was the most “valid” way forward.

During my year in the querying trenches suffering the endless onslaught of rejections, I had a lot of time to think. I also had a lot of discussion with my writing group, and Nikki, about what to do. At my one year anniversary of querying, I made the decision to switch tracks and self-publish. I knew that the longer it took to get anything other than a form letter rejection, the more that self-loathing imposter syndrome would grow.

So Pallas Lost is in many ways a figurative middle finger to all the unease and frustration borne from the unbearable weight of massive doubt. I still don’t know if it is good. But thanks to the encouragement of my wife and the dozen or so people who have read it, I am trying really hard to trust that it is.

It’s a struggle. Daily. I fought with myself on posting this blog. I’ll fight myself next week too. I’ll be posting blogs and short stories and world-building essentially while under duress. The key though, is that is okay. I need to challenge this feeling in order to find a way through it.