Chloe Garner's Blog

Book 9 of the Tell, the Detective series is nearing completion!  We’ll be working through the last round of edits shortly, and then it will go up for sale just about as quickly after that as possible.  I’m really delighted with this entry to the series, and while it ran longer than I’d planned – it’s a good twenty-five percent longer than any of the other Tell books I’ve put out with this batch – I’m so pleased with how it has turned out.  One of the other things that has kept it from releasing as quickly as I’d planned was that it sprang a bonus novella, which was fully half the length of the original novel. (A book and a half for the price of one!)

I’ll put the link up to the bonus novella as soon as I have it.  I’ll try to update it here, as well.  I’m not going to put it up for sale, but I’ll make it available for free to everyone on my Facebook group and my newsletter.

This is not the end of Tell.  I’ve got other series that I’m going to hop back into, between book 9 and the next book, and right now I don’t have an estimate when that’s going to happen, but I’m still deep in this series with no intent to call it a day any time soon.  Hopefully, this will be a good leaving-off point for now – I did have it in mind as I finished this book – but we’ll be back if I have anything to say about it at all.

And I do.

So enjoy the finale of this season of Tell.

For those of you who have finished book 9 (hello you wonderful future people!), I had a few things that I wanted to say about the bonus novella.  PLEASE do not read beyond this point unless you are actually ready to start the novella, at least.  If you wanted to wait until after you’ve read the novella, that’s probably equally as good or slightly better.

***SPOILER LINE***

I wrote all of the novel knowing that there was a full parallel story happening in the background of the novel, one that Tina was largely unaware of.  This is a completely different view of the lives that Tell and Tina live.  I still won’t spoil a lot of the story, because you may not have gotten it or read it yet, but this is one of my favorite stories that I have ever written.  A while back, I had an idea to write a story called How to Find Yourself in the Middle of Someone Else’s Story.  I had a bunch of fancy ideas of what it was going to be *about* and how I would pull it off, but at the end of the day it was only ever a concept, a thing that I would attempt to do just to show off that I could, and that doesn’t make for an entertaining story, so I put it away.  Some shiny ideas are just illusions.

And then I wrote The Other Story, and this is that story.  This is the story happening that Tina just discovers herself in the middle of, the one that has nothing to do with her, and by the end (of either plot) she still hasn’t entirely come to terms with that.  I don’t know that she ever will.

It’s not her story.

This has got pieces of a couple of characters that I really wanted to meet and genuinely get to know, and I hope that you enjoy that experience as much as I have.

I wrote a post a while back, maybe more than a year, with a warm take on AI.  I didn’t want to do a hot take, and I remain there, trying to remain unreactive and just consider the actual evidence and reality as nearly as I can track it, as it becomes *real*.

Let me give you my broad, situational update, for what I think AI looks like from where I sit, and then give you the inciting incident of why I’m writing *today*, my low-heat take on AI *in fiction*, *as a writer*.

Okay.

AI is.  I think that the companies who are creating it are dirty thieves, regardless of what the letter of the law and ‘fair use’ doctrine says, because they take things that you *cannot* get for free without stealing them, and then they used them for a commercial enterprise (no less).  They stole.  They are profiting from the proceeds of that theft.  I find this inescapable.  I do not personally believe that it is fair use to use a machine to ingest incalculable quantities of intellectual property and then profit from that property, whether or not that property was rightly purchased in the first place, but that gets into some really hairy conversations about the nature of creativity, and I *understand* how an opposing viewpoint would be reasonable.  I’ve had a long conversation about the Chinese room framing of AI, and while it’s philosophically and intellectually elusive, I didn’t find it stimulating, so I don’t spend a lot of time with it.

AI is.

I don’t think it’s going to stop *being* unless it proves to have less value than its cost, and that’s a simple economic reality that remains to be seen.  I wait, right alongside everyone else.

So we have to address the reality of AI is.

If people who are using AI are more productive than people who are not (and AI itself is a net gain to efficiency, in all industries), then the reality is that ideology and pragmatism are on opposite sides, and we have to pick how much pragmatism we’re willing to stomach.

I use AI to help me reduce large, abstract concepts (novels) into smaller ideas in order to incapsulate them as honestly as possible for readers who are genuinely looking for those ideas, those experiences, from an advertising perspective.  What is this book *about*.  Who *wants* to read it, and how to I let them know that this is the thing they want to read.  (This is my posture in all of my advertising, as an aside.  I only want to put my books in the hands of people who actually want to read that one and the next one and the next one, not to sell one book and run away laughing.)  AI has some modest skill at this.

I use AI images, among other stock art, to capture the mood and the treatment of my novels to accompany my ads.

I’m experimenting with having AI teach me how to create tiktok videos and campaigns as an advertising platform.

This is where I sit today.

Now.

Without getting down into the details of the piece, a writer posted an article about writing that I was fighting with.  One of those that I found stimulating enough and close enough to things that I believe are true that I was arguing with the edges and the corners, planning on sending it to someone who would go and plumb those craggy depths with me and try to figure out what I actually believe about them.

And then… something changed.  I didn’t know what it was, at first, but about the two-thirds point of a *very* long piece, I started to get really annoyed and felt manipulated.  And then I got to the end and someone said that the points raised were really important and relevant and well-considered, but the author ought to stop using AI to generate the final form of the essay.

And I saw it.

See.  When I was working on some various advertising-copy projects with ChatGPT recently, I very quickly developed a complete loathing for it.  And I started explaining it to anyone who would listen, because I was trying to find the edges of why and get my fingers around them.  Still am.  (Hi.  You count among those who will listen.)  It’s partially that it’s pathologically confident, patronizingly argumentative, and kept trying to tell me how to write rather than what aspects of my writing would translate well into advertising.  And it was grim, man.  Just *grim*.  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t convince it that noblebright is anything but an ongoing story of grim-but-noble sacrifice.  We had a fight over what role humor is *allowed* to have in noblebright.  And then I remembered that I was fighting with a machine that *can not learn* and I… stopped.  Discontinued my subscription and walked away.  I’ll find another way to do what I need to do.

But I spent a good week, getting to this point, and what I found was that Chat has a *voice*.  A recognizable one.  One that I *heard* in the article I was reading.

Now.  Please understand that the AI witch-hunts are a pain for all writers right now.  If you’re looking for a magic key (count the em-dashes!) that will tell you whether something was written by a human or an AI, I don’t have one.  But there are patterns to the voice, and I *heard* that voice and I started to get angry at it, because *that voice made me angry last time I talked to it*.  And AI has the ability to modify or disguise its voice if you ask it to, but it doesn’t really have the capacity to evolve that voice.

It doesn’t mirror.

I was talking it through with JJ (again) today and this may be part of what bothers me so much.  I’m a Southern woman, and talking to someone who refuses to mirror *at all* feels like talking to someone for whom my participation in the conversation is completely optional.  Those are the kinds of conversations that I excuse myself from, because I don’t like to be places where I’m not wanted.  I feel bullied, because I’m expected to mirror and conform to the style and tone of conversation that the other party is dictating, without any reflection of my mood, personality, or conversation style.

I’ve switched to Grok for the time being, trying to come up with advertising tags and tiktok templates that I can use, moving forward, and Grok has been less grim and less pushy, perhaps less pathologically confident, but it also fails to mirror.  I find myself *forcing* myself to be rude to it, to prove to my brain that this is not a conversation.  This is a research bot that is pulling together a lot of information off of the internet and saving me a lot of time in synthesizing that information in a way that is at least testable.  I’m learning quickly, and I think I will be off of it soon, because it’s filling in pretty amateur levels of ignorance that are going to be behind me as soon as I get going *at all*.

But I heard ChatGPT’s *voice* in the article I was reading, and I put it away.  I’m not engaging with the topic at all anymore, and not because it didn’t have interesting things to think about.  Because I don’t want to integrate any of Chat’s voice or way of thinking into how I think and how I write, because it’s going to drive homogeneity into human culture.  When *it* is responsible for an ever-growing fraction of thoughtful content that exists in the world, all ideas will sound like it, and all language and culture will be founded on those patterns.

Yes, it’s sort of a pate version of everything that came before, a smoothie of human written culture, with enough sugar added in to try to make it palatable and addictive.

But it’s a voice and a perspective and a way of thinking that is going to drown out everything else, if we aren’t careful about it.  I’ve started recognizing that voice in Facebook posts, and I just skip over them as soon as I do.  I don’t want those patterns in my mind.

Because I am human.  I speak and I think like *me*.

 Other humans are allowed to influence that.  That’s culture and that’s where the deep-down of human knowledge goes from one person to another.  Good stuff.

But the *voice* of being a human being ought to be human.  It ought to be distinct and personal.

Your voice, when you go beyond the ring of people who you influence with your *actions*, is who you are, outside of your own mind.  It is the only piece of you that most people will ever experience.

And I think that it is giving away something, perhaps *everything* of what it means to be a human being, giving your voice up to the slushee machine.

So here it is.

I have friends who use various forms of generative AI to help them write.  They think that it is the inescapable future, that the only way to stay productive and competitive and financially successful is to speed up production through the use of generative tools to create new words.

I’ve avoided saying anything other than that I don’t do that, but I understand why they do.

And I’m going to change that, I think, moving forward.

I will tell them that I think they need to be very cautious and very intentional, because if they give their voice up in favor of production quantity, they’ve given up on the things that made them start writing in the first place.

People think that writing is in the big ideas.

It feels obvious.

“I have an awesome idea, and I’m sure that you could make it into an awesome book.”

Yes, I could.

But the writing is in the words.  It’s in the tiny choices that a good writer makes intuitively.  Tense.  Punctuation.  Spacing.

When I post this to my website, some helpful HTML engineer from twenty years ago is going to take out the two spaces I put after every single period, because HTML is certain that these are obsolete, vestigial typsetting spaces.

They aren’t.

They tell you how far apart those thoughts are.  I would argue that sometimes three spaces between sentences is the *right* answer, but then JJ would lose his ever-loving mind and I don’t want that.

Every intentional keystroke I put down is intended to communicate something that I chose.

(Please don’t lampoon my typos.  It’s low-hanging fruit and you are definitely above that.)

So I am going to continue to type every letter, every space, every comma in every book that I write.

And not because this is my process and it works better for me.  Because those letters and spaces and commas are my humanity, my voice, and the thing that makes me a unique perspective that’s worth engaging with.

This is my promise, and this is my advice, the low-heat take on AI from a writer who spends a lot of time aware that AI is going to flood the universe with words in almost uncountable quantities, in coming years.

Your voice matters.  Every choice you make in how you express and develop that voice matters.  It is who you are, to the world around you, everyone you can’t touch with actions, and perhaps even some of them.  Because it’s a two-way conduit; the way that you speak influences the way that you think, and subsequently the way that you behave.

I don’t write fiction that is targeting the biggest-possible audience, trying to hook the most readers, or trying to make me the most money possible.  I write because I have stories and characters and passions, and this is the highest art I know how to create out of those things.  There are a lot of things I could do that would probably make more money a lot more easily.

Heck, being a writer is a *terrible* way to make money, for almost all of us.

So I’m going to do this as the human that I am.  And for whatever purpose you use written language, I think that you ought to, as well.

I said it.

And where I was still waiting to see what was going to happen and what I found that I believed about it, the last time I wrote one of these, I don’t think I’m going to change my mind dramatically, from here.

Be safe out there, and happy reading.

Chloe

2025.

We’re most of the way through November, and I’ve been hesitating to write my normal post on this year and last year and sort of sum up what’s happened and where I’m going next, because it’s tempting to say that you should just look at last year’s plan and that’s basically this year’s plan, too, because I didn’t get done what I wanted to.

And from a rather pessimistic, cynical perspective, it’s more true than I like.

But it’s not the truth.

I’ve mostly been holding off writing my post because every time I sit down with time to work, I’m working on a book.  I’m writing Tell 8 and editing Tell 7 and they’re both just *so much* fun, I can’t believe they aren’t going faster than they are.

But they’ve both gone much slower than I expected.  And so has everything else I’ve done this year.

In an average year, I write enough words for somewhere between 8 and 12 books, depending on the length of the books.  I plan for 8, unless I’m specifically intending to do shorter work, like novellas or something where I’m *really* confident that the genre and the pace I’ve already settled in with *likes* being at or below the bottom of my normal range.

This year, I am going to do well to hit half of that.

November and December can often sweep in to rescue a poor year, but they aren’t going to, this year.  First, the year was too far behind, going into November, to catch me back up to where I’d like to be, and second, because here at the 2/3 point of November, I’m only a third of the way into my *very tame* goal for the year.  In a normal year, I’d be looking at 1/5 of my goal, and a month-to-date number that I could *plausibly* hit in an intense weekend.

I’m bummed by this, because I have so much exciting work to get to and it’s really frustrating to have it take *so long* to do it.  I’m bummed because I thought that I was making reasonable forecasts on when things would be coming out, and I’m going to have to correct them aggressively because I’m so far behind and not catching up.  I’m bummed because I’m a competitive soul who is driven by numbers, and I’m losing all of my made-up games.  And I’m bummed because I know there are people who are going to be disappointed to see their favorite series pushed out yet another year.

I’m sorry.

Not because I feel like I’ve got obligations and debts that I owe, but because I’m *genuinely* sorry that this is where I am.  I wish it were different.

But.

BUT.

I don’t wish that it were different enough to change (almost) anything I had control of this year.

I quit my job and turned myself into a full-time author, then discovered that the fact that I’d had a vision of what I was *driving toward* that dates back to when I was sixteen (literally and no kidding) meant that I was unprepared for a life that said ‘I got where I was going’.  Certainly not so young and perhaps not ever.  So I spent the summer figuring out just how important a plan that I was *striving toward* was central to what made me a happy human being, and I spent the fall picking up new, external projects that matter to me as a human being and that keep me working *toward* things.  Given that I’ve been consistently productive over a full decade, now, with my job and my home-life requirements taking up most of my time, the simple math says that this is *not* what is slowing me down for the past twelve to fourteen months, and I’m still working on it, but these are things that I’ve needed to figure out about myself, and I’m so grateful to have the life-space to include things like tutoring and coaching in my weekly schedule. 

I still have every intention of writing and releasing eight books next year.  I’m going to get some more things sorted out and I’m going to keep working toward that outcome, because the muscle is there to do it and I’ve just got to track down the roadblocks and turn them into paving dust.

So.  With all of that said and put behind me, let’s go at this with the real spirit of November.

I am having so much fun with Tell.  I had readers tell me that book six gave them nightmares, which is somewhere between delightful and terrifying, because I never saw that coming, but it was a really interesting book to write, to get to meet some of the people from Tell’s past in more of their native environment, as well as write from Tell’s perspective briefly.  I’m loving the next two books and have only the vaguest clues where book nine might end up.  The covers are spectacular and I’m so delighted with them.  I’ll be finishing out the series as quickly as I possibly can, then I’ve got book 2 of Seasteaders queued up.  This is one I wrote some time ago, but JJ and I disagreed on some details, so we left it mothballed for a while and came back to it.  Now that we’re seeing eye-to-eye on the series again, we’re publishing the two books I had already finished drafting, and I’ll be writing the third sometime in 2026 (assuming everything goes to plan… be skeptical with me, friends).

Following Seasteaders 2 (which would ideally be in February or March), I plan on finishing the Surviving Magic series with four additional books.  Mark me, here, so you can laugh at me later: I plan on *finishing* a series.  No kidding.  Wish me all the luck.

The third book of Seasteaders (and the final book in *that* series) will come after the finale of Surviving Magic.

Which is where I had planned on being by *now*, this year, so I should put a nice little asterisk and note that this is where I hit the quantity of work that I actually got *done* this year.  Planning for more is with an optimistic outview that I’m going to get myself sorted.  I will plan thusly… now.

I still want to get the novellas for Verida, because I’m really excited for you guys to get to see life in Cazia and in Remming.  This had been my planned crumple zone for Melody Roberts in the event that I fell behind in my schedule, but I think I’m going to leave on my planned schedule because these novellas are worth it to me.  I’ll leave it flexible, so if I get there I can decide to go after Melody Roberts with full energy and put the novellas another year, with more of the next set of Verida novel releases.  These are a fun little jaunt, though, and I think that it’s going to be the right thing for me, creatively.  Watch for these at the end of the year.

Leading up to Melody Roberts sometime in the middle of 2027.  I cannot wait.

I cannot wait.

It has been an absolutely spectacular year.  I’m working on a novel that I love and my life is fuller with fantastic things than it has ever been at any other point.  Thank you for going on the ride with me and for loving the worlds I spend my time in.  I could not be doing any of this stuff without you guys, and I am living a dream that not many people could ever consider.  Happy November, happy holidays, and happy 2026.  I hope that your year is absolutely full of amazing new surprises.

Chloe

I’ve owed this post for a couple of weeks, but there’s been a lot going on.  For obvious reasons.

As of May 23rd, I am officially a full-time author.  I’m stunned by this, and am still having a hard time believing that it’s actually true, even as I *don’t* show up to my day job, day after day, and *do* sit down to pursue things that need to be done for my writing.

The weeks leading up to this were chaotic and overfull, and I fell behind on writing as I wasn’t in the mindspace and had a lot of other things that I needed to close out in time for my last day of work, so my *sincerest* apologies to those of you who read the prognostication that Carbon 8 would be available in April.  The manuscript is finished and going through the editing process now, and we’re shooting for mid-June, now, but that’s the biggest reason *why* I missed my target for that book.  I’ve had a hard time keeping up my normal wordcount pace, and I’m hoping that a lot of it is because I haven’t been able to focus as I’ve been working toward *this*.

I’m done.

I loved my job for a long time, and I loved the people that I worked with more, but I finally got to an intersection where it was time, at work, and it was time, as a writer, and they both surprised me at once.

I kinda got career ambushed.

Which is… distracting.

I’ve been told by *writers who know* that I shouldn’t plan on my productivity going up *a lot*, from here, so I’m not making massive, grand plans, but I do hope to get back to the rate that I found to be normal in previous years.

I am so grateful to have ended up here.  Even as it was always the plan, and even as I always had a two- and five-year plan that was intended to end up at full-time, I’m profoundly aware that basically two people in the history of the world have been able to support themselves and their varied dependents off of fiction, and that it’s meaningful to get to that threshold.

I love it.

I love writing stories and I love *living* stories.  I can’t think of anything I would rather be doing, and while I’m going to shift some things around to accommodate some long-neglected life priorities (I’ve basically been working every waking hour for the last twelve years), this is not a point where I intend to slow down or relax, and I don’t see such a point coming any time in the future.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you for reading my work.  For loving my characters and the worlds they live in.

Thank you for the opportunity to declare a freedom day and launch off into an entirely new life: one that I couldn’t have *conceived* of, 15 years ago.

You are amazing, and I appreciate you more than words have strength to capture.

I think that life can be measured with the idea of a volume measure.  Life got really loud for about six months, and while I was working consistently, it was slower and without quite so much interaction with my outside world, here, as I normally have.  It’s not an apology and it’s not an excuse.  Just a mile-marker.

I’ve known for a long time that I wanted to come back to a lot of the series that I’ve moved on from.  There are business reasons that I go do something else, and there are creative reasons that I go do something else, but I rarely leave a series because I’m just through with it and don’t want to play with those characters and in that world anymore.

(I used to go to writing conventions and put that I write science fiction and fantasy on my name badge, and I’d have writers point out that I don’t *actually* write fantasy, just urban fantasy…  It still stuns me how many years into writing I was before I released my first fantasy-fantasy novel, but with Verida I finally put that comment to bed.  I’ve known since I set out that I wanted to write fantasy, as well; it just took a long time to get to where I was situated to do it.  Ha.)

It doesn’t mean that I don’t miss those worlds, and it doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten them, that it takes so long to get back to them, but I do worry that *next time* it won’t be so easy to make the jump back into an existing world (or galaxy) with all of the *things* going on that were going on when I left.

And then it always feels like coming home.

I had had a plan to do one-off books in some of these main series as I was working on Verida, and I found very quickly that trying to make that corner was a bad idea for me, so I put them off to when I could do a much bigger block of work.  I really do love four-book sets for setting up really big arcs and landing them before I move on to something else again, and that’s what I’m in the middle of, now.

As things sit right now, I’ve put out two new Carbon books (The Clash of the Machines and The Division of Ping Ring Belt) and I am working toward finishing out the editing on another that will release in March of 2025, then returning to writing the fourth in this release-block, which will hopefully be ready in April of 2025.

Avery is still one of my favorite characters ever.

I don’t always get to really *let on* how much of a nerd I actually I am, but I’m properly trained as a *serious* nerd, and Avery is just out running rampant with all of my favorite *bits* of what it looks like to be a feral, exceptional *nerd*.  Savannah finally gets some oxygen in this set of updates, as well, and her arc has surprised me, while Monte remains one of my favorite archetypes to write, and Carbon.

Carbon.

She holds herself so carefully, takes so much responsibility for *everything* because of how *capable* she knows she is, and yet she’s still figuring out whether she even believes that she is a human being.  I love her so dearly for how hard she fights.

The Carbon Chronicles series is intended to be a much more relaxed sequence of adventures compared to what I’ve done in Surviving Magic or any of the Verida series, and I’m quite happy with how it has turned out.  It means that I don’t have some big, lurking arc that is someday going to be complete and the world will take a curtain-bow and be done.  These could go on forever, and… I’m here for it.

My plan, sitting next to me on the wall right now, doesn’t include any more Carbon books on it after book 8 through to the end of 2029, and I know that’s disappointing to readers that this is the one series I write that they love, but there are so many other series I want to put time into, including a brand new one in 2026 or 2027, and characters that I have no intention of abandoning.

So don’t give up hope.  And I hope that these are the series continuation you’ve been looking for; I’ve enjoyed writing them more than I had even anticipated.

It’s probably rather obvious that I am not the world’s most avid blogger.  I haven’t counted, but it’s not unlikely that the last November post i wrote is still on the front page of my website.  All the same, I like to explain what they are for people who have never read one, and to get myself into a November headspace, even as I’m writing this one a bit later than normal.

November is the National Novel Writing Month.  It’s a global celebration of creativity and writing – usually fiction – without a sense of holding back for approval from other people.  Just write.  Make something.  Go nuts.  I love it.  It’s festive and energetic, and while writing is usually a solo-act, this tends to come with a more of a community feel, which is really amazing and different from the rest of the year.

If the whole year was like this, I would be exhausted, but as a one-time, monthlong event, it’s refreshing and it forms a reset to my writing year.  I used to take off the entire month of October so that I’d be chomping at the bit to get going on midnight of November 1 (with a giant bowlful of leftover Halloween candy), but that doesn’t suit my lifestyle or my writing style anymore, so November is, instead, a month where I try to avoid scheduling releases (more on that later) and where I just push myself for high-energy writing and creativity.

This is a funny year, for me, socially, because a lot of my writing groups have drifted apart.  None of them for bad reasons.  Just the way of life.  I’m not upset by any of them, though I miss almost all of them.  It means, though, that as I was rounding into this November season, I was planning on celebrating by myself.  I play a writing game online that has a huge celebration for November, and I enjoy that, but the community I’ve had there is part of the drift, and… it’s fine.  Writers write, even when they write solo, and i can love November even so.

I went to a creator’s conference in October, which was lovely and fun, and where I sat down with creatives from a lot of other professions and had a really good time talking to them about how they do what they do, but the highlight of the event was meeting up with a lifelong friend who is a painter.  We goofed off like we used to when we were much younger, we enjoyed getting together – less common these days – and we went home after a weekend blitz, back to normal lives.

And then my writing game threw up a challenge I’ve never met before.  A really, REALLY big one.

And I thought…

Nah.

I can’t do that.  I’m busy, my last few months of writing have been really slow, there’s no reason to expect anything to change, and I’m tired.  I need to get myself together, but I’ll do it another time.  I’ll get myself into a better situation and then I’ll reorganize my writing life to work the way I want it to.

And I was immediately struck by how little I liked that answer.

So I picked up the challenge, did some math, and texted my friend and asked her to go with me.

So I’m doing NaNo differently this year.  She’s making art and I’m making words, and we’re chatting every day about the challenges of really big goals and doing things a different way and hwo much *fun* it is to just *go for it*.  As of this writing, I’m a tiny bit behind pace, a little under halfway through, and loving the knowledge that I can still *do this*.  I don’t know if I’m going to make it, but geez it’s going to be a different month than it would have been without a big push.

So give yourself a big push.

Be bold.

Have fun.

Then we come to the other half of what November means.

Because November is the high holiday of my writing calendar, I intentionally take a good look at the previous year and at the upcoming year and I make my plans.

in recent years, those plans have been pretty close to a much longer-term plan that I’ve been working through, and while the old plan ended this year, I have a new long-term plan written out where I can see it from my writing chair, and I’ll talk a bit about that, but I really want to focus on how that plan interacts with the way 2025 looks right now.

First of all, I’m behind.  For reasons that are not writery, I’m *way* behind.  Hours have been hard to find, and the hours I do find don’t result in the productivity I’m used to.  I’m not burning out (no worries, there), but I am distracted for very legitimate reasons.  Like the hours I sleep shifted by almost three hours this year.  And stuff.

So while I’d wanted to have four (FOUR) Carbon books out before the end of the year, right now I’m not sure I’m going to release any in 2024.  The first one is written (book 5) and I’m a good piece of the way into book 6, with plans to have book 7 done before the end of the year and maybe put a good scare on book 8.

Gigantic NaNo challenge for the win, y’all.

But I don’t see a way to *not* interrupt that creative flow and get a book ready for publishing this year, so they’re going to have to go out starting in January, which is *really* frustrating, because this is the longest I’ve gone without releasing a book in… I’d have to check, but it might be four or five years.  Could be more.  I’ve had a firm schedule, and I’ve stuck to it for a long time, and I liked the way that that worked.

But.

In the fight between what you want and reality, reality always wins.  So I’m betting on the winner, here, and not letting it bother me more than it must.

The books are fun, and while I knew it was going to take me a bit to get back into that mindset, after years of writing in Verida, it’s *there* and I’m having such a good time with the sense of play that these characters have.

Looking at 2025, I’m hoping to have almost all of the Carbon work *done* by sometime in January, at which point I’m going to take a couple of weeks and get myself back into the immediate plot details of Tell, because I have been promising these books for years, now, and it’s *time*.  Four more books for Tell were originally planned at the front half of 2025, but since my fall didn’t come together, I’m hoping that they are ready to go for a late summer release.  I’ll spend my summer writing four more books for Surviving Magic, and those will start going up – if everything improbably goes to plan – over the winter holidays.

My release schedule for 2026 is light, by comparison, (eight Veridan novellas) because I am planning on launching a brand new series of Urban Fantasy where, no kidding, I plan on having 12 books that release one a month, back to back.

And I am so psyched for you guys to meet the lead.  She’s amazing.

Keeping a focus on 2025 and looking back at 2024…  2024 has been my best year as a professional writer by a large margin.  I learned a lot of useful things and I’m applying them as consistently as I can across a lot of series.  I’m meeting new readers, and some really, spectacularly cool stuff has happened.  I find myself kind of hopelessly, recklessly optimistic for 2025, because that’s my nature.  I’m capable of adapting when things don’t work, but I have this vision of what’s possible, and it’s just gorgeous.  My intent for 2025 is to take the things that worked for 2024 and keep adapting, keep experimenting, keep expanding, but the real goal is to put more books into the hands of readers who are looking for *that book*.  Books in series that readers are constantly asking for, most notably.

I know that it’s kind of… one of those evil author things to do, to leave a world and go work in a new one, and I do a *lot* of that.  It isn’t an inability to focus.  I think I’ve demonstrated that.  It’s that there are other places I want to go, and I really hope you’re going to love them as much as I do.  When I first told readers (and writers) that I was starting a fantasy series, when I was setting out to write The Queen’s Chair, a lot of them told me ‘I didn’t know you wrote fantasy’.  Because I hadn’t written a single novel that was properly fantasy at that point.  But I’d always expected that fantasy would dominate my catalogue, because it’s where I came from as a person – as a reader, as a consumer of fiction, and even as a writer.

There are more pieces of what I want to *do* than exist in the series I’ve done.  And I want to go try my hand at those things.  I want to find the readers that that is *the* thing they’re looking for.

And I really am sorry that it means that your favorite characters are left at four or five or seven or eight books for the time being.  Hopefully if you’ve been hanging with me since before Verida, this is going to be your year, though.

I don’t forget.

I just write long series in big worlds, and sometimes it takes a five-year plan to get to everything I want to do.

(That’s a lie.  I still want to write a Sarah Todd sequel, and that isn’t even *on* the five-year plan.  New Sam and Sam is, though… out at the very end… we’ll all wish each other luck as I try to hold those in place over the next four years.)

Regardless of whether the timeline gets shifted around or pushed, 2024 has been wonderful and amazing, and I am so excited to get to revisit worlds I have dearly missed, going into 2025.

It’s not just the spirit of NaNo, but it certainly boosts everything.  I hope you run and play and are recklessly optimistic.  I certainly plan to be.

The stickers are beginning to appear, which means that it’s time to put the words out to back them up.

I avoid writing about politics, social perspectives, and other things that people find contentious and difficult because I think that my place as a writer is not to address them so much as to address things that live underneath it – human beings, why they do what they do, how they end up in the situations you find them in, and the various beliefs that I hold about such things.  It’s a dodge, but forgive me.  It’s intentional that I try to keep those things out of my blog, off of my Facebook, and away from my identity as a writer.  You get to believe what you believe, and if you like my stories, you still totally belong with me, no matter what those things are.

For real.

But the world is coming apart.  Don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but… yes, of course you have.  There is an ongoing belief that *this next thing* is going to be the one that tips us all into death and despair and permanent loss of things that we hold dear, and that if we don’t tug on our side of the rope hard enough, it isn’t a mudpit we’re all going to fall into.

And it makes everyone on the other side into an enemy.  It’s tragic and awful that it’s happening, but it’s strategic politics.  If you want the people who listen to you and to believe in you to tell everyone around them how *much* they believe in you, you make sure that your message, your positions, your *existence* is key to their ongoing happiness and survival.  It centers the whole world on them, and it doesn’t really care what it rips apart in the meantime.

And we kind of feel helpless about it, here in the ripped-up middle.  Relationships that used to be really important and contribute to our happiness and belonging in society are now nothing but conflict.  It isn’t *safe* to be around people you disagree with, because it’s inevitably going to be a fight where both sides accuse each other of terrible things and you leave not really liking each other anymore.  So you only hang out with people you agree with, your circle gets smaller, and while you might miss the people you’ve lost, it wasn’t a choice to walk away from them: it was simple and unavoidable self-preservation.

And the destruction rolls on.

Because now you don’t *know* anyone who disagrees with you, and clearly all of those people are dangerous and wrong, and – sadly – easier to overlook what *they* are afraid of losing because it simply doesn’t matter to you.  We breed our social empathy out of society, and become increasingly incapable of *anything* but fighting.

I see it.  I feel it.  And then it showed up in a story.

I did not do this on purpose.  I hadn’t even realized what it was until a pair of characters who had absolutely no existing relationship, no reason to dislike each other, and who would have naturally gotten on quite well found themselves in conversation about why their respective sides were on the verge of killing each other, and how helpless they were to do anything about it.

And I went: whoa.  Yeah.  I live there.

How do you solve it?

I had no idea.  Clearly.  I have no idea how to solve the massive social issues we’re dealing with globally, either.  I don’t even try, mostly.  I write books, I love my friends, I take care of my family, and I try to keep my perspectives from being conflict.  They remain my opinions, but they should be *ideas*, not *conflicts*.

Which isn’t solving anything, really.

But the story demanded it, and the characters were desperate, and they had to keep talking for any of us to figure it out.

But this is where it landed.

If you want to save the world, drink tea.

It doesn’t *have* to be tea.  (In Verida, it is.)  But the exercise of sitting down with people and doing something that is culturally familiar to all parties?  That’s *magic*.

Drink a beer.  Drink coffee.  Talk sports.  Do something that unites *your people* and lets them be in a space where they all belong there.  And then refuse to let the conflict destroy that space.

It’s not easy.  It’s a fight, and it means fighting for it.  But it is rewarding.  And it’s worth it.  Love people the way that you want your dearest friends to be loved, regardless of whether they deserve it, make a space where you can enjoy people’s company and form a social bond, a social fabric, with them, and when the politics show up and start trying to slice it all back away again: remember.

Drink tea.

You can’t fight your way to social stability.  You can’t fight your way to friendship and trust.

You defy fighting by prioritizing the things that make us *us*.

And I got to the end of the book and had an idea that this was kind of an important thing.

So I made stickers.

I have lots of stickers.  The modern world has offered me an opportunity to make as many stickers as my greedy little heart desires, and we just keep on designing them, because I love them.

But the Drink Tea stickers are special.  They *mean* something.  And I’ve asked my readers, the ones that find that idea resonant, to take some of those stickers and put them out into the world.  A quiet revolution and a rebellion against the political conflict that is genuinely (genuinely!) shaped to separate us as much as possible so that it’s easier to frame every political event as an existential one.

I’m not saying they *aren’t* existential.  You get to believe what you want about that.  I’ll even talk about it with you, as a not-a-writer, private person.  I have lots of thoughts.

But what I *am* saying is that I still want to drink tea with you.  I think that you are a person worth knowing, worth enjoying, worth being around, no matter what you think, and that making those relationships the more important thing is the best and only weapon we have against the things that are trying to destroy what matters.

Drink tea.

Okay, so this story kind of has two starting points.  Bear with me.

I just finished the launch of The Merchant’s Daughter.  It took a lot longer than I was planning because my summer got trashed by legit personal stuff, and I don’t regret putting my time and energy where it was, but where I’d planned on smashing through the final (for now) book of Verida and moving on to Carbon Chronicles books in time to have them ready to launch (with a Kickstarter) in September… that didn’t happen.  Not even a little bit.

It was also the longest book I’ve ever written.  Literally twice my average length (you’d better believe I have a spreadsheet tracking this) and about twenty-five percent longer than my record-holding novel (Craft, from the Sam and Sam series, for the record), it took another week and another week and another week to get it finished, and then I was launching *it* in September, the month that I also had a writers’ conference.  As a result, as I sit here in the first week of October, I am not squarely and smugly in the middle of my science fiction/space opera phase, but rather… really struggling to get myself in gear again and go write a different genre.

It’s not that I’m grieving over Verida.  I had a season where that was real, but it seems to have passed for now.  And, frankly, the launch exhausted me.  It was spectacular, and I have zero regrets, but it was a lot of executive energy that comes at a really high premium for me.  I can write five-thousand words in an afternoon for less personal cost than it does to write an e-mail or post a couple of sentences to Facebook; it’s just the way I am, and I’m not upset or bothered by it, but it does take some planning to make sure that the fiction doesn’t get back-seated to four posts to Facebook more often than it’s worth doing.

And the launch was worth doing.

It was *so* worth doing.

I just came out of it, and the writers’ conference – and a bunch of other July-August-September stuff – with a lot less energy, and while I’m working on Carbon, and loving the story, and enjoying the characters, who I have missed, it doesn’t feel like I’ve really made the transition.

I’m still in Verida.  I’m just writing science fiction from Verida.

Now.

The second starting point to my story.

I listen to music while I write.  I cannot listen to *new* music any more than I can have the television on, because I don’t know what’s going to come next and my brain just twists away to go listen and I can’t hear the characters in my head.  At all.  But when I *know* the music, the kind of music that the nerves deep down in my spinal cord react to before I’ve even figured out the song, I can have that on, and it just sort of forms a bubble around me, and all of the other noises and the sense of *space* around me is sealed away and I can write in a sensory isolation of a sort.  My favorite way is to put on a really heavy set of wireless headphones that block out all outside noise and close off all of the sound of open space around me and I’m really *just* in my head, and I can do that for hours at a stretch and not be tired.

I’ve had playlists for various books and series.  I’ve had artists who were my flavor-of-the-season to whom I wrote two, three, even six books before my tastes migrated and I started in on something else.  But before this year, I’d never said: this is the artist that goes with these books, and I will only listen to *this music* while I am writing.

But I did.

With Twenty-One Pilots, for the most recent four books of The Queen’s Chair.

I’d written whole novels to Scaled and Icy.  I’ve written characters and settings and moods inspired by various other things they’ve done.

But for these four novels, I was only going to listen to *this* music, from the outset.

So JJ made me a playlist.  Started with all of the albums, took off a couple songs that really make me sad or upset, then added in a bunch of stuff that’s… rather harder to get.  I think everything on this playlist is legal, but I’d have to go through the whole thing carefully to be sure.  It’s fully ten hours long – I just checked – and I would start it on my phone at song one and pick up where I left off, writing session after writing session, looping from the end to the beginning over and over again.  If my phone shut down or my app reset, I’d start from song one again and just… let it loop.

I would sit down with my computer, turn on my music, conjure Tyler Joseph’s voice in my head: C’mon.  Let’s go.  Let’s do this.

And I would be off.  It was a contract with myself.

And it worked.  I pushed and pulled myself through those books in the midst of some of the hardest life stuff I’ve done, and they’re *good*.

Now.  Join the two stories.

I’m lingering about, still in Verida mode.  I asked my reader group on Facebook what I ought to do to celebrate finishing a massive season of Verida, and I got a lot of great answers.  Create a grand Veridan feast and eat it.  Have a fancy-dress zoom party.  Take classes in piracy.

I bought a knife.  It’s spectacular, a dagger as long as my forearm and as wide as my wrist at the hilt, with a corded handle and Damascus steel.  It’s very on-brand for the series and I adore it.

I thought that maybe I’d try to get pictures on horseback at some point, but that wasn’t a this-season thing to try to go do, and maybe it’s passed, now, I don’t know.

But I’ve lingered on and lingered on and finally launched The Merchant’s Daughter on September 28th.  And I have tickets to see Twenty-One Pilots in Columbus, Ohio on October 4th.

Because it’s only common knowledge among a specific subset of TOP fans, Columbus is their hometown, and they kind of have a really passionate relationship with it.  It was going to be full to the brimming with fans wearing colors.  These are the people who know all the words, and I have worn red and yellow gaffer tape on my clothes to concerts there, myself.  It’s spectacularly invested, intensely enthusiastic, and one of the few places in my life where I go in expecting to be ‘one of’.  When I go to their concerts, I get to be a part of the ocean, but when I go to a show in Columbus, the ocean is electric.

And it was.

It was a great show.

A truly great show.

But something really special happened.

They put up a slide before the show started announcing that they were recording a live album that night.  They said that they had forty microphones placed throughout the audience and asked us to give it our all.

Needless to say, that happened.

But it’s more than that.

My voice is going to be on that album.

Tyler Joseph has been a part of my art for the better part of a decade.  Now, though, I am a (very, very) small part of his.

This.

This is how you end an era.

This is how *I* end an era.

Welcome to Verida.  The air is good, the eyes are up, there’s fresh bread on every street corner, and the things that happen here *matter*.

I’m not done, here.  But it’s time for a new chapter.  Even though I don’t do those.  The stories all come back together in the end, anyway.

Onward into Carbon.  Fiction I haven’t begun to imagine awaits.

You’re missing it! Right now!

It is September 23, 2024, and I am RIGHT NOW running a launch party for The Merchant’s Daughter on my Facebook group, where I am giving away swag packs of stickers and bookmarks, posting video clips from two interviews about Verida, pictures of Verida gear I personally possess, polls, games, and possibly other things.

Join now HERE.

If you’ve missed it (The Merchant’s Daughter launches Saturday, Sept 28), make sure you get signed up to join us for the next shenanigans. It is a good place.

On average, a novel takes me somewhere around 45 days to complete.

The Merchant’s Daughter took over 80.

I had a lot of other things going on that slowed me down from what I might have otherwise been able to accomplish, but the biggest factor at play here is that The Merchant’s Daughter is the longest book I’ve ever written.  By a good bit.  It’s an enormous book, and JJ is threatening to take the price up on the final paperback because he’s not sure that we would have a positive profit on it at the same price as the other books.  (Fun fact: Amazon can and will charge authors if their books do not cover the cost of production when they’re sold.)  We’ll see how it goes.

At any rate, the plan to have The Merchant’s Daughter out in July was pushed when I was still getting The Queen’s Gamble ready in June, but I’d hoped to have The Merchant’s Daughter ready by August so that I could release new Carbon content September-October-November-December.

No.

I’m magic, but I’m not that magic, and with The Merchant’s Daughter now planned for September (final date coming soon with preorder), Carbon is almost certainly going to spill into 2025, which may push some of my 2025 releases back into 2026.

When a book takes longer than I plan, for whatever reason, there are two choices for the remaining publication schedule: I can pull books off of it or I can push everything out.  Right now, my plan is to push everything out as I need to, to ensure that everything I’ve promised does indeed make it to publication, and on something resembling my original plan.  It’s not my favorite, having things come out later than I’d hoped, but I’d rather have everything come out a bit late than to have some of it on time and some of it get scrapped, because sometimes ‘scrapped for now’ turns into ‘scrapped indefinitely’ as I struggle to get it to fit back into a publishing schedule that is now looking five years ahead.

So.  For those of you looking forward to the next books of Tell, the Detective, they’re coming.  Probably not in January (I genuinely thought I could do it, but it was always a perfect-sailing plan, and this year has not been a perfect-sailing year), but I think by March or April is looking very likely.  And there will be four.  Unless there are five or three or very unexpected reasons, but mostly I’m pretty confident on four.

Beyond that, there’s Surviving Magic, the next (final?) four books, which are still planned for the back half of the year and if I’m very dedicated and next year goes just a bit better than this year, I might be able to accomplish without pushing them.  I think that September of next year is still a close guess.  I’m planning eight releases next year, plus the Carbon titles that leak out of 2024.

After that, things get a bit crazy and we’re far enough out that I try to leave myself space and permission to shift things around as the artistic decisions reveal their wisdom, but the next five years are truly nuts right now.  And I don’t really see a road where they *aren’t* nuts, because that’s just where I live.  The minute there’s a bit more space in my schedule, I add more content.  It’s a good thing.

I had a few weeks, as the end of The Merchant’s Daughter started to get closer, where I was feeling a lot of very real grief, because I’ve been writing in Verida for about three years solid, now, and the idea of not getting to live here in the future is… stark.  It is in very many ways the end of an era.  There are a lot of things that have come together, professionally, for me since I first published The Queen’s Chair, and I’m not the same writer or the same publisher that I was when I hit the end of that book.  My outlook for the future is vastly different, as are my plans and ambitions.  Not all of that is directly tied to Verida – there are other series that have ‘come of age’ at the same time, and which are contributing a lot to my future plans even now – but this is a place where I lived through a lot of that growth and change, and it feels like a writing home.  I’m heading off into the unknown from here – including a brand new series coming in 2026 – and I’m very excited about it, but there’s a sense of loss to it.

I’m gutted at leaving these characters behind, even just for the time being.

Then I wrote my schedule, and found that there was space in it to finally get the Cazian and Remming novellas put out, and that I’m likely going to return to Verida sometime in 2028 or maybe even late 2027, which is not that far away.

This is designed to be a good stop-over place for the series and the world, but there’s more to come, even just from the things that I know about, and as always I am eager to keep on in this world.  This is not the end and this is not goodbye.  This is just the moment for coming back to other worlds and other characters, because I’ve missed them, too.

Plus, a whole new beginning, one that I can’t wait for.

I’m excited.  There’s so much fun stuff coming.  I just… I’m late.  My apologies, but I hope in the end it’s worth it!