A Shadow, Observed
From the vantage of a stark tower in the middle distance, the light of a beacon.
Hi! It’s been a while.
I miss my weekly missives; I took enough time away from them to feel genuinely nostalgic for the amount of structure they represented in my weeks during the Derby and shortly thereafter. I did need a break at the holidays, and then the Substack Question reared its ugly head.
I had planned on a quiet exodus elseweb, and yet, it turns out that everywhere else I could possibly go at the moment is untenably more expensive or genuinely worse, detrimental for my bottom line in terms of time spent. Harvested by AI. Harvested by scalpers wanting to sell your various nonsense for spare parts. Some other garbage that makes my life worse.
I’m so tired, yinz. Social media is presently a waking nightmare and a publishing essential logistical quagmire from which I feel I cannot extract myself but which is tangibly detrimental to my well-being and I am still working out a relationship I can tolerate.
I’m exhausted and I crave simplicity however noxious the leadership is.
Substack it remains for the moment, however tenuous and subject to change. I retain the right to retreat into the wilderness and never be heard from again, save in cryptic missive sent in the dead of night by lantern-signal.
Anyway!
Some fresh and juicy news tidbits:
In my editorial capacity, under the Jay Wolf auspice, I have handed in the first draft of an essay for New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine! This year looks to be a banger, with headliners like Molly Tanzer, whom I’ve adored from afar since her novel Vermilion; Harry Turtledove, a legend with a long shadow; and of course, the most esteemed Michael Moorcock is back, with a reprint of a previously un-collected short story. The magazine is crowdfunding for issues 3 & 4 at present, and has some truly fun additional items (of note, the enamel pin: bullying works, apparently, as I am one of the clamoring hordes keen to wear my battle axe on my sleeve):
Back the campaign here by March 16th!As part of the NESS campaign festivities, I also had the pleasure of discussing sword & soul author Kirk A Johnson’s short story “Cock and Bull” from his estimable collection The Obanaax & Other Tales, joining NESS Editor & Publisher Oliver Brackenbury; NESS Copyeditor & author of Where Peace is Lost, and my personal dearest bestie Valerie Valdes; MVMedia Owner and EIC, author Milton J Davis; with Kevin Beckett, NESS Social Media Coordinator & Proprietor of the excellent & essential sword & sorcery Substack Just the Axe, Ma’am helming the control room. It was a grand opportunity to shuffle my TBR and this story is a hoot. Kirk will have a new story featuring these characters in issue 4 of NESS; the cover story, in fact! I’m looking forward to it.
Further crunchy news morsels: micropress Flamespeakers Union is the new home of my publishing & editorial services. I have been trying to circle the square of: I want to grow my editing business, I want to expand my art & illustration services, and I want to publish books with a publisher name on them, I want a source to point to when trying to deal with (insert publishing business nonsense here). Flamespeakers Union is where all of those things can coexist and I don’t have to do the dance of “which of my names do I use for this” around being a person with too many hats and not enough places to hang them. The website is still under construction but please give me a follow on bluesky, twitter, instagram, etc. and I will have full launch news in a later weekly missive. It’s quite possible the title of this publication will morph to that, or I may simply make a segment of the Scourgelands expressly dedicated to it. It’s early days yet and logistics are not wholly ironed out.
I have a series name I like, finally, for this book (these books).
I had always boxed in “the Scourgelands” as a way of talking about the grand shape of this world, from the very beginning of the Derby last summer; it’s why this newsletter is titled in this fashion.
With an eye to the future and a strong sense of purpose, I bring you:
The Song of the Scourgelands. Of which: Bringer of the Scourge is Book One.Work on The Shepherd in Shadow continues apace! I am writing with greater clarity than I was in drafting Bringer of the Scourge, but also with greater heft in terms of tracking and maintaining the moving parts of this narrative, because I now know it to be a series and linked to other work I have done and not yet published. I’ve ascertained for myself that there is a trilogy arc here. I have a robust outline for Shepherd, about which I’m quite pleased. The heretic’s servitor and prophet’s pawn; wizard and coward Mehren Tevaht was one of the biggest surprises in writing Bringer. I had assigned him a specific place in the narrative and I could easily write an entire newsletter about how he wrenched his way out of his original role in the story. Maybe I will have to do that in the run up to publishing it…
Following Shepherd: Kharise takes point in Crown of the World Unbound. Because there is some inter-linkage of the timeline in these books, bits of both of them are being completed in tandem. There is a new narrator joining the trio of Vierrelyne, Kharise, and Mehren, and some of this early work is in nailing down that character’s voice. The identity of this narrator is likely no mystery to readers of the first book, but I will confirm: this personality is an absolute delight to write from and I’m looking forward to hearing what my readers think about it when it finally hits.
I am presently slating The Shepherd in Shadow for June 11th, 2024. Why am I giving myself so goddamn little work time? Honestly, because: the Derby, for all the things I loved and struggled with? It worked. I wrote a book and stopped agonizing over writing the book. I broke the holding pattern that took over my life after nearly a decade of centering my obsessive compulsive disorder and its desire for things to be “perfect” such that it cuts the corners of rejection writ large (spoiler alert: that’s not a valid avenue, but that’s never stopped me from needless catastrophizing). Anyway! 29 days into drafting, I’m happy with this book and I think yinz will be, too.
Last but not least: print! my personal nightmare! eternal bog of my publishing dreams! It’s imminent. I will have more news as early as next week, and for fun: a preview of the cover art updated for the format.
Why yes, I did make myself a template for a series…
I have finished painting the cover of Shepherd, but I am saving that for a cover reveal closer to the pre-order date. I would really like slightly more book on paper time before I set that up, but for now, my placeholder art is:
That’s all for this go-round. I have an essay I’m still gnawing on, and, as advertised, lots of forthcoming news that’s starting to pile up, so I have resumed forward operations hence.
Bringer of the Scourge is, as ever, available in ebook almost, but not quite everywhere; if you have read it, please drop a review on that big river site, or Goodreads, or the StoryGraph! (And to those of you who already have: thank you! I see you!)
Climbing back into the saddle with vigor, shoulder to the wind,
’til Hell won’t have it!
—M.
Wow you got a lot done! Congrats on all of it. I need to follow your lead about social media to get at least a fourth of the things you accomplished.