Some part of me regrets not getting this up on the 1-year anniversary of my last post, which would have been a couple of weeks ago. It could have proven either how naïve I am or how well time helps someone forget the amount of editing, formatting, and literal Hell that goes into getting a book ready to publish. After all the stress of trying to get the story and words right, you have to step back and get the font and cover right before reading it all again to find plenty of mistakes you missed the first twenty times. In the meantime, none of these important aspects of creating a book quite qualify as writing, but satisfying that itch only draws the process out longer. It leaves you somewhere between psychosis and torture, but when it’s finished, if you still believe in the story, you don’t give a second thought to opening another blank page to start the process over again.

I promise I’m not writing this to complain about how tough it is to do something no one is forcing me to do. Instead, this is my public sigh of relief to be (finally!) finished with and ready to announce the publication of my second novel, the sequel to The Road Cain Walks. The title is Southern Ouroboros, and it takes place immediately after the first book, so if you have not read that yet, I would suggest starting there. In fact, the first page of the prologue has significant spoilers, so if you’re the type to avoid those kinds of things, crack the spine (or swipe the E-page) at your own risk. Otherwise, I’m proud of how this came together, though it ended up a completely different animal than the first one. It comes in part from what the story needed and part out of a refusal to write more of the same. Looking ahead at everything to come (or what I know is coming), it makes the most sense to allow each book to evolve into its own entity, in whatever form that takes. For The Road Cain Walks, it was a murder mystery (or several) with a pretty twisted family drama as its backbone. For Southern Ouroboros, it is something a little harder to identify, maybe because I’m too close to it right now or because two books into a series gives me double the chances of spoiling something. Whichever is right (or more right), I will say this one bends its genre further by adding a Western element into the mix in the form of a backstory that, to me, is as much at the heart of this book as Grady Perlson’s was in The Road Cain Walks. Justin Doring was nice enough to again lend his extraordinary artistic talent for the cover art, which I think turned out well enough considering my mediocre-at-best design skills.

Beyond publishing a new book, I can also announce that I have a good start on the first draft of another one. This will be a standalone novel that I plan to shop around to literary agents when it’s finished, so it might be a while before it reaches you. I’m shooting for no more than 300 pages on this one, so the hope is to have it ready to send out sometime next year. At that point, I’ll decide if I’m ready to jump into Book 3 of the series or write something else. It will all depend on which ideas have gestated long enough. Until then, I hope those of you who read the new book enjoy it and, as always, take a moment to let me know either on the Amazon page or Goodreads page. I’ll post here again when I get the chance, if nothing else than to let you know when I’m running any promotions. Just remember that every day you don’t hear from me is a day I’m making some kind of progress on whatever comes next. As always, thanks for your time and attention.

Matt

Southern Ouroboros