Write Everything Down

Forcing myself to blog today.

I’m the worst at journaling. The first time I journaled anything was in 1988, in Mrs. Goebel’s 2^nd grade class. We even made the book. Construction paper folded in half and stapled to a fancy sheet of brass cardstock with big diamond patterns. Mine was made of four pages of orange construction paper. We wrote two entries on each half page, front and back, for a total of 34 entries. One for each week of school.

Nature has cursed me with a good memory.

I didn’t touch a journal for 20 years after that, and only because I needed to for a college assignment. Had to make a blog, too. That went well.

I’m weird and not terribly interesting as a person. Social media isn’t my thing. I’ve done travel writing, drink reviews, metal music reviews, a homebrewing newsletter, and a cooking blog. Academic writing was wonderful, challenging, and gave me a solid sense of validation, but I’m not motivated or smart enough to add anything intelligent to the discourse about 19^th century British women authors. I work as a copywriter and feel very meh about it. Honestly, it’s taken me almost two hours to write this much for a website blog that I own and can do anything with. If I wanted, I could take a photo of my ass, post it, and erase any complaints in the comments. I have a lot of freedom, just not a whole lot to talk about.

However, in the past four years, I’ve written 10 books. Five novels (three are upcoming), four novellas, and a novelette. Two other books are sort of floating and half-finished because I’m not sure where the hell I’m going with them.

Creative writing might be the only kind of writing I enjoy. It’s certainly the only thing that settles the crazy brain waves.

How, you may ask, does a nobody indie author pull off such a feat of text production? I work one job. Don’t have many other hobbies. No kids or close friends. Video games are hard to play for longer than two hours. My wife and dogs are pretty chill and entertain themselves. My life is pretty low key.

(And honestly? A couple of these books could be better. I’m looking at you, Gingerbread and Dust Bunnies From Hell.)

More importantly, I do two things:

First, I break one of the cardinal rules of writing by not giving a shit what the general audience wants. If I cared about or wrote for a wide American/European audience, I would need to go back to drinking every day just to make it through the week.

Second, I write EVERYTHING down.

I’m a bitchin’ note taker when the subject matter interests me. No matter how weird the subject matter or how out there the scene idea, I write that shit down and keep it. I have 30 years of books, notes, stories, ideas, doodles, daydreams, and scribbles in multiple formats within reach of my chair.

Some people hoard stuff; I hoard my daydreams.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with all of them. Right now, I’m in a low/contemporary fantasy phase. My editor (blessings and curses be upon her goblin crown) and I are pushing through The End of Forever, which is scratching the heck out of my itch for drama, fantasy, and (as far as I’m concerned) two of the most believably badass women main characters ever penned. (This might be a bit hyperbolic, but fuck it. The trilogy is going to be amazing.)

Anyway, The End of Forever will springboard into a nine-book project that’s steampunk mythological Downton Abbey meets The Avengers in a world I first created when I was 16 years old and starring characters I've spent 20 years writing and banishing into myriad folders. I even already know how it ends.

Write everything down. Hide your notes under your pillow.

I’m going to try to get on a blog schedule for 2026. Maybe an every other week thing. Even though I maybe see four people on this blog and sell a book a month, I still have this notion that there is this invisible, nebulous thing that has expectations of me. Now that The End of Forever is drafted, I feel safer talking about it in certain terms, so I might start there. I’m just not interested in building a hype train around it, so I don’t yet know what I’m going to say.

Next blog will be about Gingerbread and how I can’t fathom why people have openly admitted to reading it more than once.