Between 2012 and 2015 my brother, Andrew, tried with modest success getting me on the horse with this indie author, writing, thing…
I had no idea what I was doing, I did minimal research, things were crazy with my day job professional as a working soccer and lacrosse referee, and cycling through unique twists with distinctive Offspring.
The loss of my irreplaceable and brilliant niece when she was just short of her fifteenth birthday, the impact on all of us—especially my youngest, followed by a solid two and a half years of full-out emergency/high-alert mode before things settled down enough for me to take up The Work again. Sobered. Humbled. More than a little broken too.
Yeah, I’m going to talk about suicide and adolescents, adults, celebs, all that. Some other time. It’s a lot harder to write about it than I thought. Hard truth for a writer to admit—words fail and emotion pounds the snot out of ya.
But I’m back at this. And of course, shortly after resurfacing and this time actually doing the research and preparation and sifting through the backlist and the Works In Progress sitting in the pile untouched for a couple-a-half years, I work one of the best high school seasons in my life only to wind up in the hospital ER, in agony, with a spine that basically said, “fuck you, buddy, yer done. For good.” I’m still working on the reality kick in the head that says I have to hang up the whistle for good. I’d like to think the surgeons and PTs and docs, and people around me are all full of shit and a year from now I’ll laugh at them all making FIFA Fitness Test benchmarks and driving my assigner up the wall with match requests. But for now…
…now I write. Full time. 120-hour work weeks. It’s how it is, The Work drives it all. Well, what my not-recovering-as-well-as-I’d-prefer spine allows—I sleep in 3-4 hour bursts, hobble around until the pain interventions kick in, work until sleep seems possible, another 3-4 hours… spit. Rinse. Repeat.
A LOT has changed since 2015 in the indie authoring world. Marketing is a whole new hyperscientific crapshoot, the workload hyperballistic and the resellers/distributors caprice in such flower, the goal posts are in continuous motion, contraction and not that much expansion in a genre-marketplace so saturated it’s a wonder anyone can make enough to buy coffee let alone earn a living. There are trademark wars raging, requiring attorneys, therapists, courts and the UPTO. But we’re all figuring it out. A lot of people stood up, stepped up, put up, and are helping each other.
In the middle of all that I’ve been through and what’s going on now around me, my own Work is taking shape and pointing me in a direction. I grabbed some backlist that foolishly hadn’t been professionally edited and had homemade covers and were priced… ya know. Whatever. I found an editor, I cleaned up and found a cover designer. My editor on the Love, Death, & The After series applied himself through Book Two in spite of his own retirement from the business and graciously kept on my ass to make sure I finished.
And there’s direction now.
I’m working on a steamy romance (yeah, it’s harder to write a badass panty-dropper than you might think), another half dozen titles in post-apoc thrillers, more monsters, more boundary pushin’, more quirk and grit, and more fabulist short fiction.
So, this is reboot 2018. Sign up for my Reader List because you’ll want to go for the ride.