Do you even blog, bro?

Blogging is harder than I thought. I don’t really have anything to say. Nothing interesting, anyway.

I just hit 45. I’ve got a pretty rad, average existence. My wife is my best friend and fun to hang out with. I love my dogs. There’s a mortgage, but our little suburban house is ours and isn’t breaking the bank to keep up. My job isn’t interesting or challenging in the slightest, but the people I work with/for aren’t terribly demanding. When they need me to help them, they actually need help; they’re not just passing shit off onto me.

I essentially have the life I’ve always wanted. No kids. No chasing a dollar or lifestyle creep. I work full time from home. I’ll never own a cabin up north or a second home, but I won’t go hungry (not eating was the worst part about growing up). My debts are small or tied to something I can do without (car payments are scams). I feel like I have a lot of personal control over what I can control. I don’t have many external forces demanding access to my headspace. I am fortunate enough to afford a hobby that I don’t feel compelled to turn into a second job or money-making scheme.

Summarized: I’m at a point in my life where I can indulge my wants. So, what do I want to do with my life?

I like daydreaming and catering to my creative brain. Reading and writing have been my chosen art/entertainment media my entire life. Movies, video games, sports, martial arts, mechanics – everything I got mildly obsessed with at various points have come and gone, but the written word has always stayed.

Variety in what I consume keeps me on an even keel. The music in my head goes from showtunes to 80s power metal. I’ll sit and get all misty while listening to the Pride and Prejudice soundtrack, then throw on some Vader and Anaal Nathrakh immediately afterward. There’s something transcendent about riding a flow of emotion from one style of music into another, especially when the songs have traditionally competing demands and expectations. I write folk horror, splatter, cosmic, horrormance, kinda YA, and cyberpunk, and they’ve all been practice sessions for my contemporary fantasy trilogy currently being edited and the stempunky saga I’ve got planned after. My bookshelf is filled with every genre and nearly every voice. I like variety.

The problem with that is that my “creative” variety doesn’t like to be individualized. I don’t want to write just one genre, and I’m not interested in being expected to adhere to genre tropes or conventions. My YA doesn’t like having its foul language or darkness lightened. My romance wants the evils and the horrors to win. My horror wants hope and laughter. I want terror in my Paradise. Gore splattered across my cozy. I want an idyllic brownstone community filled with gaslight, autumn leaves, magic, and nightmares. I want my prettiness to bare its fangs and my love to save the world through rage and violence, and I want it to look fucking sexy doing it.

Hallmark has its own movie channel; I want mine to be Hellmark. Every Saturday at 2PM we play Bridget Jones: Diary of a Madwoman.

I’m consolidating the worlds in my brain to two. Gingerbread, though it wasn’t the greatest book, is going to house the world where I fart around with horror. It’s going to be my Creepshow or Goosebumps: weird tales surrounding the fictional Minnesota towns of Dye’s Corner and Abrams. Some short, some long, all fucked up.

My contemporary fantasy trilogy, The End of Forever (Book One next year?), creates the mythology upon which I’m building my Avalon series. As much as I wanted to just have a modern fantasy trilogy, there are characters I can't let go of emotionally. It's also the trilogy which makes sense of my abusing so much real world mythology and dragging it into Avalon.

Untitled Avalon Series (patent pending, trademark, copyright, I licked it first) is going to be witchy, steampunky, violent, romantic, and silly. I want it to be a fun, creepy, heartfelt world where Pride and Prejudice and Zombies doesn’t just take place as a pretty backdrop but makes perfect sense to the narrative. Where Gilmore Girls meets Deadpool. A world where Downton Abbey and Sanditon hold down Game of Thrones and spit in its mouth before going to tea with Penny Dreadful. Wine tastings and bloody exorcisms. Sword fights in ball gowns. I want capable, smart, and tough women at the center. The sort who group around their estranged sisters, hold up a finger, and say, “We’ll save the world right after we save the farm and our fractured relationship,” then throw on their impenetrable plot armor and kick copious amounts of morally contemptable ass. Women who support and are supported by decent men who are smart and humble enough to recognize the better traits in others and adopt those traits in order evolve, instead of sucking off narcissism to inflate their egos and demanding others recognize them as the standard to which all others be held.

I want my Miss Marple to shank a werewolf with a hat pin. I just want to be able to carve out someone’s vital organs with a modern kitchen appliance or stir up their guts with a weed whacker, too.

Indie/self-publishing lets me do that. It’s not about writing a story for an audience; it’s about creating a world that doesn’t need to be met with money or praise for me to be satisfied with it but doesn’t talk down or insult its readers to get there.

I think this is where my writing brain is going to live for a while. It’s taken me a long time to figure out what and how I want to write, so hopefully this is the next personal step at becoming a better writer and having more fun writing stories.