[DIGEST] Recovery...

Your weekly stackable roundup

September 30, 2023

This week has been all about recovery. I got home from NINC on Monday night, and have been taking it as easy as I am able. I had a great time talking to so many of you down in Tampa, and the one thing that kept coming up was that you felt overwhelmed by having to do all the things.

This is very relatable. Monica and I often feel the need to do all the things competing with our body’s inability to do all the things. That was one of the main reasons we created the Author Ecosystem. We found that certain actions filled us up (or at least didn’t drain us) and have been using it to help guide us to the actions we should be taking.

I’ve been forced to come to terms with my own mortality a lot this year since getting Long COVID at 20books, and the Author Ecosystem is one of the things I fall back on over and over again to help guide my path.

That said, some things you just have to push through, like when you are at a conference for a week. Sometimes, you just know life is gonna suck a bit, but the experience is going to be so great the rest of it is worth it.

I wasn’t going to share a photo this week, but then I remembered my wife sent this photo of our boy Cocoa playing with a llama I got him before we left, and it filled my heart with joy.

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.

NINC was super fun, but I’m paying for it now. My body has a way to make a devil’s bargain so it can get through hard things, but I’m now super paying for it. I’m hanging on to a 2 right now, and it’s tenuous.

WHAT I WROTE ON SUBSTACK: This week, I wrote about my road to 101 paid subscribers and a little orange checkmark.

Additionally, shared my short story Akta’s Ice Headache on the Substack.

I didn’t want Phil involved in this whole escapade, but there weren’t many people I trusted. I needed help. A gang of demons wanted me dead, and now I had Benny’s crew breathing down my neck.

The garage door was already open when I arrived at Phil’s house. He had a habit of forgetting to close it. He would probably forget his eye if it weren’t attached to his head. Since he’d been kidnapped, he talked more and more about the stars. I worried he would leave me—and then who would I have left?

I pulled into the driveway and closed the garage door behind me on my way inside. The house wasn’t the rancid pigsty I had grown used to over the years, and it knocked me for a loop to see it clean for the first time.

“Like what I’ve done with the place?” Phil said. “You haven’t been inside for a couple of weeks. I know you’ve been bugging me to get rid of this garbage for years, but—but I knew they would have a use.” He waved me onward.

“I don’t really—”

He held up his finger. “As you would say, that wasn’t a request, yes? I was just being polite.”

He was right. I would say that. “Lead the way.”

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 WEBINARS: I really think I hate my body because this week I have no less than FOUR huge webinars. I’m so thrilled that so many people want me to speak to their groups, but after NINC, I’m hurting. It’s gonna be great though.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4TH @ 10:30 AM PT/ 1:30 PM PT - I’ll be giving a talk for Author Learning Center about how to have a successful book event, signing, or conference. REGISTER

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 4TH @ 2 PM PT/5 PM ET - I’ll be doing a workshop for the Writing Gals virtual conference all about funding your Kickstarter. ENROLL

THURSDAY OCTOBER 5TH @ 5PM PT/8 PM ET - I’ll be doing a workshop for RWA about how to fund a Kickstarter campaign. SIGN UP

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7TH @ 3:10 PM PT/6:10 PM ET - I’ll be doing a talk on Kickstarter for the Emerald City Romance Writers virtual conference. They have a ton of great speakers, including my dear friends Emilia Rose and Dylann Crush. GET YOUR TICKET

Hope to see you there!

UPCOMING ARTICLE: Next week, I’m talking about why you probably need a break right now.

I have been overwhelmed recently with the deep, guttural need to scream. I have no idea why, but it bubbles up several times a day while I’m simply going about my life.

I have a mouth, and I must scream; at nothing in particular, just the overwhelmingness of existence.

Not even the burden of existence, or the pressure of existence. Just the existence of existence fills me with the need to scream.

Things are not even going poorly. They are going as well as a human living in a hypercapitalist hellscape can expect…

…and yet, I feel the compulsive need to scream.

I’m not even mad, or sad, or particularly emotional at all. Yet, I feel a need to scream that comes on from nowhere and all at once.

If I could get by with one scream, perhaps I would cave and let it out. One scream, while alarming, is barely enough to turn heads.

But it will not be one scream. One scream will lead to a cavalcade of them that will cascade into eternity.

I fear if I start, I will never be able to stop. Society would not allow me to let out a scream as long and powerful as my soul aches to force out, and certainly not as often as I feel the need to release it.

So, I keep my mouth shut and cover it with my hands until the need sinks back into my belly once again.

In this way, I am like Ted from I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. The Allied Mastercomputer of capitalism has formed me into some sort of compliant jelly, and while I do have a mouth, I cannot scream.

Still, I am filled with the unceasing need to do so…and one day, I will explode, if only to escape the pressure.

ROUNDUP: Here are some of my favorite articles of the week. This was a hard one b/c Substack’s app was bonkers, which sent me trying a bunch of different things to access the new articles. It all ended up okay in the end, though.

Business-y:

Publishing-like:

Lifestyle-ish:

UPCOMING KICKSTARTER: Get Your Book Selling Direct to Readers

Monica and I have been talking about direct sales for a long time, and many of you have asked us to put together another definitive guide like we did for Kickstarter.

So that’s what we did, and it’s coming in November.

Learn how to sell from your website, crush it on Kickstarter, make a profit at conventions, and generally succeed at direct sales. It’s going to be a monster book, and we can’t wait to share it with you.

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