[DIGEST] Lyin' eyes lionize lion eyes

Your weekly stackable roundup

July 22, 2023

We’re staying in Ngorogoro this week, but focusing on just one of the big cats…the female lion. I thought we might see one or two lions, but we got so many lions in so many situations it was bonkers. We saw two lions sleeping in the middle of the street, lions sharing a meal with their cubs, and even lions using our SUVs to hunt zebra. It was so many lions, and I loved every minute of it.

(Also, a quick aside. The title of this newsletter is my favorite tongue twister. I will often prep for interviews my saying it five times fast, which is in itself a callback to last week’s tongue twister, Hi Ena, hyena.)

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 at SDCC this week, which means I’m simultaneously a 5, a 1, and everything in between depending on the minute of the day. It’s an amazing experience, but whoa is it like drinking from a fire hose.

Kickstarter: There’s less than one week left on the Kickstarter campaign for my awesome urban fantasy academy duology, The Wicked Witch Academy.

Are you in love with all things magic and witchy? Do you swoon for dragons? Did you love the Dragon Strife trilogy? Then you'll love the Wicked Witch Academy!

I should be dead.

When I was five, the great dragon Ramidion sent an assassin to slaughter me. The gods blessed me that day, but my handmaid was not so lucky. She died so I could live.

When I was eight, Emperor Paraphal attacked my home with five thousand men and six dragons. The great dragon Ewig held them off while we escaped into the mountains, nearly sacrificing himself in the process.

Two years ago, they found us again, and my mother died saving my life. After that, I vowed that nobody would die to save me again. If Ramidion and Emperor Paraphal wanted me so badly, I would bring the fight to them.

Now I know how to make the whole of their kingdom come crashing down upon them. It will take all my cunning to infiltrate the Wicked Witch Academy and steal what I need to destroy my enemies, but I am so close to ending this that I can taste it. Nothing will stop me now.

Join Gilda’s daughter Ophelia in The Wicked Witch Academy duology, the epic follow-up to the Dragon Strife trilogy, and find out what happens when a girl chosen by destiny chooses to embrace the fate forced upon her by the gods.

If that sounds cool to you, I hope you’ll click the button and check it out. This is the only chance you’ll have to buy the paperback or pick up the ebooks outside of in a bundle on my web store.

What I wrote on Substack: This week I analyzed Substack and its viability as a vehicle to help chart the future of publishing.

A new chapter of Magic also dropped this week. We’ve ended the first part of Magic with a beautiful vista and a boss battle.

“Rhew!” I screamed, and ice shot out of my hand, encasing two demons in a frozen cocoon. Kimberly disappeared to fight two demons lunging toward her. Meanwhile, I stabbed the final demon through the heart with the dagger, and it disintegrated into ash.

“Awesome.”

The ice broke around the first two demons. The heat pulsating off their scalding bodies was too great for a normal spell to contain them. Luckily, their temporary encapsulation bought me enough time to readjust. One demon took a swing, and I ducked, jabbing it in the stomach with the dagger, and it also exploded into a million pieces.

“Well, that’s fun,” I said.

I looked over to see one of the demons near Kimberly fall to the ground after she stabbed it in the neck. I could smell the demon behind me, and I rolled backward as it slammed its fists on the ground I had just vacated. I took the dagger and stabbed it deep into the demon’s back, kicking it off as it turned to ash and floated away.

New chapters are free, but paid subscribers can access the archives. You also get access to a bunch of free books and stories from my back catalog.

Upcoming article: On Wednesday, I’ll be releasing an article about how to build a world-class Substack that I’ve been researching for months. It’s a full 15,000 words and my longest article yet. I think you’ll love it. Here’s a preview.

I heard about Substack for years, but never really spent a ton of time here until Notes launched and I subscribed to 100+ publications on the same day it launched. Some people cringed when they get tons of Substack emails over the following weeks, but after that first day I dang near cried because it captured something I thought was lost forever.

It immediately brought back memories of opening my RSS feed every morning or staying up until 2am reading a thousand blog posts of your new favorite website.

Needless to say, I got Substack immediately in a way I haven’t understood any other subscription platform. It is the closest I’ve ever come to reexperiencing my childhood online outside of Kickstarter.

These days, I read over 200 publications and curate a weekly digest of my favorites, so yeah, I’m a bit obsessed with the platform. When I get obsessive like this, I can literally spend hundreds of hours trying to figure out how and why something works…

…which is exactly what I did, and boy did I learn some things.

This is the most intense and well researched article I’ve ever written in my life.

Conventions: I’m at Comic-Con this weekend with the wonderful Jessica Maison of Wicked Tree Press. Don’t look for Wannabe Press in the list of exhibitors, though, because for some reason I’m labeled at Russell Nohelty.

Instead of small press, you can find us at booth G-03.

We have an awesome SDCC exclusive collector card for you this year. It’s free for subscribers, so make sure to come hang out and say hi.

Roundup: If you still want more, then here’s some amazing articles I loved this week.

If you like what I’m doing around her 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 one of my best fantasy novels, The Marked Ones.

Rosie is completely average. There is absolutely nothing extraordinary about her in any way. For most people, that would be a blessing, but Rosie wants nothing more than to have a spark of magic, even if people say that all mages are evil. She wasn’t born with magic, though. She’s sure of it. After all, she is 17, and magic always presents when you are 13. Always. So, when she’s suddenly able to wield magic, Rosie is initially confused, then thrilled…until the soldiers come for her, and she realizes everything she’s about to lose. There is one place that is truly safe for people like her. The lost city of Toledo – a haven for witches and warlocks since before the war, and the only place Rosie can be free.

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 aren’t a paid subscriber, you can access the archive for free with a 7-day trial.