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[DIGEST] Night terrors...
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I forgot how horrifying night terrors were until Monday night, when I spent a lovely several hours gasping for air and freaking the heck out as I dozed in and out of sleep, trying to break its hold on me. Honestly, I could have gone the whole of my life without remembering that feeling. I’ve been chronically ill since my 20s, and while I often feel terrible, nothing makes me feel as helpless as sleep paralysis.
During an attack, I wake up multiple times in quick succession, unable to breathe, unable to move, begging for help that never comes, but still trying to keep quiet because I know Karen needs her sleep and don’t want to be a bother while dying. It’s rude to make a fuss, after all.
I often think I’m going to die, so in many ways I am uniquely qualified to deal with the horrors of sleep paralysis, but that doesn’t mean I like them any more than anybody else. I don’t wish that kind of suffering on my worst enemy, who is ironically me most of the time.
I’ve spent most of the week trying to catch up from my sleepless Monday night and struggling to do so. I’ve been mostly a zombie since then. It’s tiring. It’s all very tiring. Life is very tiring, and this week more than most.
Weeks like these remind me of something I think about a lot. It is my steadfast belief that almost everyone is doing the best they can given their life circumstances. Maybe they are weighed down with burdens and can’t do very much, but the overwhelming majority of humans are trying to do their best given their abilities, what they know, and what they’re dealing with at any given moment.
It’s hard, given the way of the world, to see that little nugget of hope through the chaos and hate, but it is as true a thing as I know. If we want the world to be better, we should meet people where they are and help them do more, know more, and have the capacity for more.
Hopefully, next week will be better. Here’s a picture of Cheyenne looking lovingly at me to counteract this bummer of a missive.
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 had night terrors and sleep paralysis one day this week, plus I forgot to take my pills once. Are they related? Probably. I’m not doing great currently. 2
LIVE ON KICKSTARTER: 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 took a break from talking about author growth to fete my favorite books from 2023. I waited until January to make sure I captured everything I loved, which was a lot. It was easily the best book year in recent memory.
Plus wrote about how they grew their Tiktok to 130k in the leadup to her latest book launch and wrote about how to build a personal brand to keep your books selling.
Money really was the great equalizer.
Whenever my clients complained that things were taking too long, I would remind them that if they paid more, it would go faster. Most thought it was a ploy to squeeze more money from their grubby little hands.
It wasn’t.
Money greased squeaky wheels in every language and every country around the world. Everybody had a price, and if you hit it, then they would betray all their beliefs. For some people, the price might be steep, but if you gave the most pious man in the world ten million dollars, I’m supremely confident that he would punch his dying mother in the mouth. Most people would strangle her to death for a tenth of that.
Even I had a price.
I vowed to rain Hellfire down on anyone who worked with the demon jerk Et’atal that betrayed me, but when Dexter offered me five million dollars to spare his little rodent life, I agreed. It was a betrayal of my own values. The thing was, I was broke, and I needed money to track down Et’atal if I was going to make him pay for trying to kill me.
It had only been a month since Dexter’s money cleared, and I had already used a third of it to clear my debts and another third to pay off four dozen informants to squeal about Et’atal—hotel clerks in Amsterdam and Fiji, a bank manager in Bali, two ex-employees in Sudan, old clients all over the U.S.S.R. One thing was true across all of their accounts—Et’atal was a ghost.
Not one of them had met him in person. They delivered for him. They picked up for him. They received weapons, drugs, women, and more from him, but they were never in the same room as that son of a bitch. A month of my life and nearly two million dollars bought me very little in the way of tangible information.
It vexed me, and that was putting it mildly.
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 finally talking about one of my favorite audience-building techniques, The bullseye method for growing an audience.
I write weird books. You might not believe me if you’ve come across me recently, but my first books included an epistolary novel told all in blog posts about a girl trying to prove her father’s suicide was a murder so she doesn’t leave her family home, a grounded sci-fi novel about a disabled boy who meets a homeless alien and has to help her get off the planet, a graphic novel I drew about a pickle that falls into a black hole and has to travel the universe to get back home, and a psychological horror dark fantasy comedy comic about a psychopath that doesn’t know if they are killing people, monsters, or its all in their head the whole time.
Even if you are like “all those sound amazing”, you have to admit none of them are "center of the market” in the way that Deserts, or even Grasslands, think of the market. It’s closest to how a Forest thinks about the market, but there were not even consistent themes in my work back them.
These books, along with Anna and the Dark Place, The Void Calls Us Home, How NOT to Invade Earth, and Worst Thing in The Universe, are what I consider my central canon. If you really love my work, you’ll probably resonated with all these books, but they aren’t likely to resonate with the “general audience”.
Even my first non-fiction book, How to Build Your Creative Career, was originally called Sell Your Soul: How to Build Your Creative Career. It was a joke, a pun based around soul resonance selling, which is a term I started using a long time ago to talk about how to sell creative projects.
ROUNDUP: Here are some of my favorite articles of the week.
Before we get into it, the incomparable @Anna Codrea-Rado is doing an Income Transparency Survey of creators on Substack. There are few people I hold in as high esteem as Anna when it comes to this subject, so I know it’s gonna be great. If you have a minute, fill it out here.
Business-y:
reprograms the source code, stops serving the compliment sandwich, and “has the talk” with their customers.
budgets with boardgames, lyricizes about the collapse of music journalism, and explores the experimentation layer.
guides new CFOs who aren’t CPAs, & describe their businesses as an equation, and finds the use in useless skills.
dances on the grave of credentialism, crafts a great product pitch that sells, and gets more aggressive with customers.
hires a bookkeeper against the advice of others and loves it, is the right kind of busy, and climbs down the entrepreneurial ladder.
doesn’t think Gen Z is missing the point about capitalism and how it dehumanizes work, gets interviewed for a job by a robot, and dissects what matters in social media marketing.
gets their flywheel spinning, interviews Elmo(‘s social media manager), and decides whether Netflix has already won the streaming wars.
Publishing-like:
pushes on the invisible force blocking their creativity, braves a new category, and answers editing.
mythologizes why momentum doesn’t have to be fast, insists that AI keeps putting them in a bad mood, and wears the digital equivalent of wearing a fake Chanel bag.
acts like a professional, gets what people don’t get about working in comics, and kept the original Netflix DVDs in a safe.
stands against using say and said repeatedly in prose, plots how long it takes to write a non-fiction proposal, and shares the unexpected job of being a nobody.
reformats their comic for Webtoon, shows authors how they can be better partners to bookstores, and explores different options for repackaging and repositioning a memoir.
& are living in the newsletter era, trumpets the renaissance of media, and starts a new book.
tells the truth about 2023 burnout, lies, and regret, lays out the downsides of Substack, and digs into why most media consumption isn’t real.
Culture-ish:
orders how disordered eating becomes an eating disorder, has ketamine dreams, diversifies their mind, and learns seven things from their father.
pens a letter to Ani DiFranco, divides input and output years, and notices the nice in .
won’t be doing anything in January, marvels at the healing power of sharks, and develops a breakfast routine.
explains why gender is morally neutral, aspires to be as cool as Beckett driving a Deux Chevaux, and celebrates the beautiful benefits of getting sick.
cries in a grocery store, highlights the things they still use from their 2008 wedding registry, and seriously needs to redefine the term ‘cabin fever’.
dreams of their grandmother’s Cuban coffee, breaks the prison of being perfect, and crunches the data to see whether animals make movies better.
stares directly at the ugly truth that a lot of men hate their partners, wonders if they should become a stay-at-home girlfriend, and is angry.
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 post-apocalyptic satire graphic novel, Katrina Hates the Dead.
What would you do during the Apocalypse? How would you survive?Those are the questions that have plagued Katrina for years. All the good boys and girls were raptured up to Heaven, leaving the rest of humanity to ask a single, solitary question: “Why not me?”Hellspawn rose from Hell and rampaged across the world, eviscerating all they came across. It was bedlam, Hell on Earth. There was nothing anybody could do to stop it. Then the Hellspawn got bored and settled for a quiet life in the suburbs. They squatted in the homes of the people they once mercilessly murdered.And yet humanity is strong. They persist. But everything has a breaking point, and after watching friend after friend dies at the unforgiving and unjust hands of fate, Katrina’s had enough and sets out to face off with the Devil to earn back her old life.
Paid subscribers can access the entire archive of this series from the beginning, along with other series and every article I’ve ever written.
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