[DIGEST] 600...

Your weekly stackable roundup

January 13, 2024

Hi friends,

This week the paid archive hit 600 posts. I’ve uploaded over 400 new articles, interviews, and courses there since the beginning of the year. It was super fun going through my whole computer and pulling new material that I hadn’t thought about for a long time. Since the beginning of the year I have added:

RESOURCES:

Several of these were already paid bonuses but were hosted on Teachable, so I’ve brought them to live completely in one place, plus added a ton of new material to each section.

For instance, while paid members used to have access to my interview archive from The Complete Creative and it’s roughly 50 interviews, I’ve also added interviews from my first podcast The Business of Art, plus panels, lectures, and lessons I’ve never shared before anywhere. Now it’s over 100 interviews plus dozens of additional content.

You’ll also find a huge collection of scripts from comics to movies that I’ve written in my career, presentations I’ve given, and more.

I even unearthed my first-ever blog, The LA Grind, and uploaded the best posts (over 30,000 words) to the archive as well, for people interested in making movies.

I also included four new courses from my archive. These are courses that I used to sell for hundreds of dollars but are a bit long in the tooth. They still have great information, but it’s been 5+ years since I recorded some of them. I’ve pulled out some information that I didn’t feel comfortable sharing in this archive, but they will still get you where you want to go. Whether it’s writing, marketing, or selling your work, I’ve got you covered.

If you wanted, you could spend a whole year in just my non-fiction archive without even exploring the more than a dozen novels, comics, and audio dramas tucked in there as well.

Plus, next month White Rabbit drops for paid members to read, and by the end of the year, there will be more fiction in there as well.

This brings my archive up to the present, I think. You won’t find everything in there because I’ve worked on a lot of projects I don’t own or don’t own completely, but it’s everything I can think to share.

And it’s all available for $5/mo or $50/yr. I’ve never offered this much value anywhere before. If you’re still on the fence, you can explore everything with a 7-day trial.

At some point this year I will be upping pricing, but not yet.

If you want to share how you are doing this week, then there are two ways to interact with this post.

1 - If you don’t want to say anything, or bristle at identifying yourself, then you can reply with this nifty poll.

2 - If you’re feeling very brave, then reply below and tell us how you are doing right now on a scale from 1-5.

I’m stuck in a loop of feeling kind of okay at the beginning of the week, hitting pretty decent in the middle of the week, and crashing back to Earth by Saturday. Overall, it was a pretty average week where I felt pretty average and average amount of the time. 3.

JUST LAUNCHED: Do you adore fairy tales? Are you obsessed with mythology? Do you flip for portal fantasy?

Fairy tales are real.

Rose Briar is a diabetic college student without insurance. She’s been scraping by through a combination of maxing out credit cards and relying upon the kindness of strangers.

Unfortunately, she’s spent every dollar at her disposal. There’s no money left to buy her life-saving insulin.

Without her medication, Rose falls into a diabetic coma. She tumbles into a deep slumber and wakes up in a fantastical place called the Dream Realm, where fairy tales and legends of old are still very much alive.

She has one chance to wake up.

She must trek across the world, visit the most powerful object in the land, the Obsidian Spindle, and entreat the fates; the only beings powerful enough to send her soul back to Earth.

But evil forces don’t want her to leave. They will stop at nothing to capture her and make sure she never goes home again.

Now, with the help of her half-gorgon girlfriend and a mysterious red rider, Rose must race across the land fighting dragons, monsters, and the forces of the Wicked Witch, Nimue, in order to reach the Obsidian Spindle before her body dies on Earth and she’s trapped in the Dream Realm forever.

Will she be able to wake up? Can she survive? That is the genesis of the Obsidian Spindle Saga (simplified sometimes as TOSS below), and the first book The Sleeping Beauty.

These are NOT retellings, but a new interpretation inspired by them.

WHAT WE WROTE ON SUBSTACK: This week, I wrote a breakdown of my whole year in 2023, every aspect of my business, and what it means. Additionally, wrote an article about how to scale your author business like a startup.

I tried to put it out of my mind for the next week, but something didn’t sit right with me about how things ended in Seattle, and it wasn’t just missing out on five million dollars. I portaled to Ratinger Drug to have it out with Benny—I mean, Dexter.

The whole place had been remodeled and refinished. A new, bright-faced woman stood behind the counter. Even though she’d never met me, she looked at me like she had and pressed the button under her counter. There was a buzz, and the hidden door behind her swung open. A burly demon stood inside with a shotgun. He nodded at the woman and moved out of the way so I could move past.

I passed several more guards on my way down to Dexter’s office at the bottom of the ramp, where he sat behind the desk, just like Benny had done every time I saw him.

“Ollie!” He shouted. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

Two guards stood on either side of him as I walked toward him. “Security has been beefed up, I see.”

“After last time, can you blame me?”

I shook my head. “That’s why I’m here. Something doesn’t sit right with me about how it went down. I can’t shake it.”

All chapters of The Godsverse Chronicles are now free for all subscribers. You can read the whole series from the beginning right here.

You still only get access to a bunch of free books and stories from my back catalog by becoming a paid member. You can start your membership with a 7-day free trial.

UPCOMING ARTICLE: Next week, I’m taking a break from author growth posts to talk about my 38 favorite books from 2024. I’ve already read something like 10 books this year, so I have a lot of opinions on books, which I don’t get to think about often. Maybe this is “off-brand” but I don’t rightly care. I wanna talk about books for once instead of how to make them.

I don’t even know how many books I read a year. I used to track it, but I stopped a long time ago. I know I’ve listened to at least a hundred audiobooks this year, and I’ve probably read more than that in both comics and novels. My friend last week said she read 175, and I think that’s probably around what I’ve read, but it might be double that for all I know.

I do know that most books I read wash over me, but some sit with me and stay with me for a long time. This year, I fell in love with Chirp. I fell in love with audiobooks last year, but now I spend so much money on Chirp.

With my chronic migraines, it’s hard to read as many books, so I’ve been loving reading audiobooks. I’ve also found that some books I didn’t like while reading came alive in audio.

ROUNDUP: Here are some of my favorite articles of the week.

Business-y:

Publishing-like:

Culture-ish:

Find anything you loved enough to swoon over or hated enough to make your blood boil? Let me know.

If you like what I’m doing around here and want to check out the archives, you can do that with a 7-day free trial, or simply go straight to being a paid subscriber. You also get access to my epic fantasy graphic novel, Pixie Dust.

Akta is the greatest monster hunter in all of King Odgeir’s kingdom. She’s smart, fast…oh and she’s also a pixie, a magical race that can disappear and reappear at will using magical pixie dust.

King Odgeir is obsessed with using Akta’s pixie dust to create a race of super soldiers, but Akta refuses to give it up, so King Odgeir poisons Akta and takes it for himself.

Akta, however, vows revenge and makes a deal with Velaska, the queen of the underworld, so she can return to Earth and seek revenge on the king that killed her. The only problem is that time moves differently on Earth than in Hell, and when she returns to Earth her body has been decomposing for a week.

Now, she must kill the king before her body falls apart, or risk spending eternity in Hell.

Paid subscribers can access the entire archive of this series from the beginning, along with other series and every article I’ve ever written.

If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.