A few updates on what I’ve been doing so far this year…

My blog Three From Waynesboro, telling the story of what happened when me and 2 friends sold a story to Steven Spielberg when we were 13, is finally complete (unless I decide to resurrect it to comment on the TTA reboot; we’ll see). This is a project that had been in the works since February 2016, so it really feels good to finally have it done and not hanging over me as yet another unfinished thing.

I also hit two writing career milestones recently. First, I’m now a full SFWA member! They recently voted to change their membership requirements so that you qualify based on your total career income from sf/f fiction ($100 for associate, $1000 for full), which allows a lot more people to join a lot earlier in their careers. I’m still exploring the benefits, but I’m excited to have access to a lot of features and programs which could be really helpful to me in the years to come.

The second milestone is not as much fun – now that Goal Publications has closed, Signal is officially out of print. It had a great run, though, and I’m grateful to Sean and everyone involved who worked so hard to make it look great and promote it and make it the success that it was. I’m hoping to include the story as part of a new collection later on. (It just kind of sucks when your first book to go out of print also happens to be your most recently published book…)

In other news, I’m actually using my Patreon now! I used to use Curious Fictions as an archive for my published short stories, but since they shut down I’ve started posting PDFs of my stories on Patreon two Thursdays a month (using the tag Throwback Thursday), with those posts being open to the public. I try to include some commentary on the story, too.

For my patrons, in February and March I finally got around to, you know, posting original stuff – so far, a poem and two pieces of microfiction. I have plans for Patreon-exclusive short stories in the near future, with most of them probably set in existing story worlds. (I’m currently working on a new Tesla Mae story.) If you’re interested in any of that, my pledge tiers start at $1/month and all the tiers get the same rewards, so you can give whatever amount suits your budget without missing out on the cool stuff.

Finally, my website redesign is complete over at reneecarterhall.com. I used Carrd.co to make a simple one-page site that uses section breaks to mimic a multiple-page site. It was surprisingly easy, and I’m so glad to have something that looks good on mobile devices and won’t be nearly as time-consuming to maintain.

You might notice that there’s no link to this blog on the new website. I’m still trying to decide what to do here, honestly, and I’ve gone back and forth probably a hundred times on whether to keep this blog going or just make the whole thing private and get rid of the obligation to keep it up. I feel like it looks bad to have it sit so long between posts when I don’t really have a clear use for it, but it’s also nice to have it as another venue for possible future announcements, especially with the way it integrates with my Amazon author page and my Goodreads page (another site I don’t really use anymore, except for entering the occasional giveaway).

So for right now, I’ll keep things going here, but just for a heads-up: If you’re subscribed to this blog as your main source of news from me, it’d be best to sign up for my mailing list instead, in case this goes away.

All for now…