Just looked up one day and realized it’s been almost a year since RT14, and therefore almost a year since I posted here. Oops. I’d meant to have the second Sly Magic book out by now, but the truth is I’ve been working on other things, different stories, different ways of telling them. The self-pub market is always changing, the chances of readers finding a single book by an unknown author with no platform even slimmer than before, if that’s possible. Everyone’s feeling the crunch, even authors who’ve been self-publishing for years and making steady income that way are having to step back, reevaluate, and recalibrate. It’s something I think every author, regardless of publishing path, has to do. Figure out how to keep moving forward in a swamped landscape, and not *sklorshp* out of sight with nary a startled yelp.

The way forward is always to write, by the way. You move ahead by throwing down words to step on, stringing them together to get from one shining idea to the next, until you look behind you and there’s a followable path. It might take you three months, it might take you a year or years. You might have to try out a lot of words, a lot of ways of overlapping and weaving them together, to see which ones will hold you up. You might have to start over.

Objectively, Sly Magic has so far been a failure. I’m not even close to making back the money I spent on cover art and editing, and I didn’t expect to. When we were trying to put my royalties into the appropriate blank in TurboTax, it kept changing it to zero. Come on, you have to laugh at that. That shit is funny.

Did you make a face when I said failure? Did it make you feel sad? Kinda smell mice and old paper in the back of your nose? Failure. Failuuuuure. Failure failure failure. Say it in your bedroom voice, it’s pretty. Sexy.

Because failure plus failure plus failure? Well, that’s a backlist.